Cheating Death (Wraith's Rebellion Book 2) Page 9

  The door of the room opened, and Amma walked in. She threw a bag at my side, plastic.

  “Change her. The clothing needs to be burnt. There’s a thing there, whatever mortals call it, wash her. It could be caught in her hair or on her skin. It’ll take some time for the venom to change it all. Blood and saliva, though, should be clean.”

  “Soap and shampoo?” Lucrecia asked.

  “I used to wash with mud, and I was thankful for it,” Amma snapped at Lucrecia. “You have hot water from a hose and a way to dispose of the mildly dirty water. I wonder however she shall be cleaned?”

  “I wasn’t asking you,” Lucrecia snapped back.

  Fun fact: vampires don’t all get along.

  We put on a polite public face. With that in mind, the Council seems to listen to Lucrecia and weigh her words. They may even call on her in front of mortals before showing the mortal the decision that they had already made.

  This made the mortals feel like Lucrecia had more sway over the Council when in fact she did not. Though, of the present Council members, only Amma had a problem with Lucrecia and only because of the difference of age.

  Lucrecia grew up in or around Rome. She still hasn’t told me exactly. Amma viewed her as a rival as well as a fluffy little princess. She thought Lucrecia entirely too soft due to her upbringing and would probably think the same of Helen.

  After all, Helen didn’t know what it was like to work a hard labour job, or how to kill a chicken. Let alone survival without running water, or hiding from raiders who were bent on burning your village and raping you. In Helen’s world, those things no longer existed.

  In first world countries, the idea of war and starvation was fanciful. It was for other times, few stopped and really understood what it was like to be starved, for some reason they had a hard time figuring out that there were people all over the world starving and dying because of that.

  I suppose at that point Helen would have made that small expression she did whenever I started talking about the first world people. The little wrinkle between her eyes and the press of her lips as if she wanted to speak up and tell the old man shouting at the kids on his lawn to shut up.

  She wouldn’t say anything, even though it was her generation I was making a comment on. When I first noticed the motion, I thought it because she was too polite to interject. At that moment, I found myself wondering if I had judged the new generation too harshly based on stereotypes.

  There are young men and women like that, but not all of them are princesses wrapped in fluffy, surrounded by cotton candy dreams. I was in the dangerous place of becoming just like Amma, hating the new generation of vampires for the advantages they have which were completely out of reach when I was a mortal.

  “What?” I asked Amma, who was glaring at me.

  “What are you doing on that thing?” she demanded.

  Helen had been making notes the entire time.

  Suddenly I caught myself doing what I had witnessed Helen doing the night before. Focused on the tablet, fingers flying over the screen as I tried to capture my thoughts in word form because I couldn’t verbally dictate my every thought and emotion.

  If I did, I would get stabbed, simple as that.

  “Trying to catch everything for her,” I said.

  “That’s for when she’s awake. You don’t have to keep it up now. In fact, you could shut it off, stop the recording,” Amma said with a shake of her head. “Once word gets out that an interviewer died, the entire thing will be called off.”

  “Not dead, turned,” I said. “And Helen can still hand in the interview, then disappear. Or she can elect to turn the entire thing into books. Or she could drop out and take the notes she has and create books which we could pander as fiction. She’d probably make a killing.”

  “Have you two had sex?” Lucrecia asked.

  “No,” I said.

  She hesitated. Her look was a clear implication of what she thought as Margaret walked into the room with a little grocery bag of items. Margaret slowed and focused on Lucrecia while placing Amma between herself and our matriarch.

  “What did Quin do?” Margaret asked.

  “He didn’t have sex with her.”

  “She’s had sex before,” I said.

  We weren’t certain if a hymen would grow back, but none of us wanted to be that asshole who took the risk. A female vampire had to have had sex before being turned. Vampires were sexual beings. There was no changing or helping that.

  “But you didn’t have sex with her,” Margaret said. “Oh, Quin.”

  “I couldn’t, not with my mouth doing that. I’ve tasted blood on and off since I met her. I thought it was just because I ripped off the caps, but that would have healed already.”

  “Makers and Progeny have sex. You’re supposed to break her in.”

  “I’m not breaking her in for you. And you’re not to touch her. I’ll break your hands off, keep them just close enough that you don’t grow new ones.”

  Margaret glanced at the door of the room as if wondering if she could get out before I caught her. The answer to that was no, but if she tried to bolt, I would catch her and I would hurt her.

  And I’d like it.

  It didn’t even bother me that I wanted to hurt Margaret. On and off there was just the rising urge to rip her head off and use it to play kickball. None of us had wanted Margaret, but we did our best to treat her the way we did others.

  Which meant that when she turned her attention back to Lucrecia, I pretended that I didn’t see her hesitance.

  “Did you at least want to?” Lucrecia asked.

  I bit my bottom lip, hardening at the very thought of it. There was a trickle of venom. I felt it slide down my teeth and onto my lips.

  Or perhaps that was just drool at the thought of having her in my mouth, moaning as I—

  “All right then, no harm was done,” Lucrecia said. “You were simply overly cautious.”

  “Why yesterday?” Amma asked.

  “What?” I asked.

  “Why did you take your caps off yesterday?” Amma asked. “The point of the interviews was to feel out mortals as possible vampires. They provided us with people who were too old, and we accepted under the guise of what we agreed to. This round was mainly to feel it out, so why did you remove your caps yesterday?”

  “The caps interfere with the process of milking. Sasha has complained more than once, that the stock that usually causesd a leak got no reaction at all. I supposed that with the caps on, and no ability to move freely, the instinct was restricted. Like a bird in a darkened cage, our teeth could not tell what time it was.” Then I thought about it. “That’s not a good analogy at all.”

  “Yet I believe it makes your point,” Margaret said. “Attempted bites since the use of the newer, more efficient caps, have been reduced to almost nothing.”

  “By removing the caps, I only meant to process the interviewer given to me the way I would process anyone I was thinking of turning. I gave her the full benefit of the doubt. Yes, I wanted to do all sorts of things to her. Last night I dreamed of ripping her throat out. I’ve been caught, more than once, in a daydream of pinning her down and having my way with her. I’ve not done it to be careful. To prevent this from happening.”

  “Yet you took her to meet Lu,” Amma muttered with a shake of her head.

  “I took her to see a vampire who none of you thought caused disease. Helen’s the only one who figured it out. She even told Sasha. She’s bright, for a mortal who can only speak one language.”

  “You knew, though, is my point. The more I think about it, the more I think you forced this upon us.”

  “Are you bitching because he turned a woman who you’ll have to share the men with?” Lucrecia asked. “Or because her skin is light enough to be considered white?”

  Amma glared at Lucrecia.

  “Please, educate me, oh great Amma, Maker of none, family of none, how does one properly select a Progeny?”

 
“He knew Lu was the creator of the illnesses. He’s known this entire time, all these centuries and he’s said nothing of it. You don’t find it suspicious?”

  “If you are accusing a member of my family of something, come out and say it. What would you suggest? That he is Wraith? And Lu, I suppose, is now Death. Slipping out from his guarded home to slaughter for the Council? That he is now a face to the boy that you gifted to the devil to placate him?”

  “It was a Council long before me who did that, you would do well to remember that.”

  “But you uphold the law even though everyone knows Death no longer serves the Council.”

  “It is not my place to change things of the past. And I would never suggest a runt of your family is the Wraith. If he were, the stone would have claimed him.”

  “Claimed me?” I asked.

  “The name on the tile changes colour,” Lucrecia said.

  “This is a stone,” I said. “Not a tile.”

  “Stupid language,” she grumbled. “That’s what I meant. The stone changes the colour of the carved name. How did you think we knew when we found the right one?”

  That explained a great deal. But it also meant that I had to keep that stone in my pocket until I figured out what I was doing about it. Death had never been called to serve, only Lu.

  But then, Death wasn’t very well known until after Lu served, probably because he knew that he couldn’t be called back again.

  “Are you going to insist on seeing the stone too?” Lucrecia asked.

  “Don’t be daft, I told you already. No mutt of your family could be Wraith,” Amma snapped.

  She then took her leave. It was meant to be an insult to Lucrecia, for she had no opportunity to protect her family’s honour from the insult. Lucrecia wouldn’t take it as such, however.

  I had never been certain what she thought of Wraith because I had never asked. None of us had. She didn’t like Death or Lu, wanted to see them both dead. But she had been born to a generation during which the pair had long outlived their usefulness.

  “Bring her over,” Lucrecia said, walking toward the table in the middle of the room.

  I shifted, lifting Helen off the floor. Carrying her gently, I took her to the table and lay her on it.

  She was cold as a corpse. Pale like a dead mortal. Her chest did not lift in breath and life, but there were still goosebumps down her arms.

  “This is normal, right?” I asked desperately.

  I was afraid that I had accidentally killed her. Having never turned someone before, it was possible I had done it wrong, even with Lucrecia guiding me.

  If making a Progeny was as easy as they seemed to imply, surely there had been more than just the handful of mistakes over the centuries. Three accidental vampires, I’m certain that’s all there had been.

  Lucrecia reached out and set her hand over Helen’s heart. There was a moment of silence.

  “Very faint, but it’s there.”

  “You mean we might actually die?” Margaret asked. “The mortals might be right? We are the walking dead?”

  “Would you call someone who had a near death experience the walking dead?” Lucrecia asked.

  “I would, but I also didn’t have one of those experiences, just blackness until I awoke.”

  “I had one, Quin had one,” Lucrecia murmured. “Most of us do. We see our dead loved ones, or heaven, then it’s all ripped away, and we find ourselves back here, on the mortal plane unable to ever return again.”

  “So, this is normal?” I asked Lucrecia.

  “I’ve never seen it before, but I assume it is,” Lucrecia said.

  Lucrecia had said that she sat with Sasha as she changed. Perhaps it was too long ago, or perhaps all Lucrecia did was watch. The tools and lighting of the modern world had changed how we looked at our immortal bodies.

  “We need her clothing off to wash her,” Lucrecia said.

  “Let’s cut them off. That way no one between here and the furnace is tempted to take them and becomes Typhoid Mary,” Margaret muttered.

  She moved to a cupboard along the wall and returned with a littler pair of scissors. With those, she began cutting away Helen’s clothing.

  “Do you use this room?” Lucrecia asked.

  “Of course,” Margaret said. “I quite prefer it. I do hope that by the time I am free of the Council, the climate has changed and I can do as I please once more. Cloning isn’t advanced enough for me to make and then eat mortals.”

  “Does no one track the in and out?” I asked.

  “As far as the mortals know, we hold Council in a big building right in the heart of downtown. All glass and steel and high up above the rest. No matter how close we come to the mortal veneer, we have kept the Council chambers away from prying eyes.”

  “Can you imagine one of them laying eyes on our prizes?” Lucrecia asked.

  “I think the still moving eyes of a werewolf would throw them off. They might even be convinced that those are a movie prop and not ancient security cameras created by a witch. Did you…?”

  I looked up from the tablet as Margaret hesitated.

  “Oh yes, she heard me utter about some supernatural races. Showed no distaste. Not racist or sexist from what I can tell. No more Ammas are going to happen if I can prevent it.”

  “A woman cannot be sexist,” Lucrecia said sternly.

  “That’s like saying a person of colour cannot be racist,” Margaret said back in a bored tone.

  She and I stiffened as one. I looked up at her, and she pleaded with me silently to change the subject. It was the sort of subject that one did not bring up around Lucrecia if they wished to survive the night without being harmed.

  “I should let you two do the washing,” I said.

  I set a hand on her hair, wanting to tangle my fingers in the long, dark brown tresses. I even wanted to bury my nose in that hair, to breathe in her scent before they washed the last of the mortality away.

  I did not.

  However, had Lucrecia not been there, I would have been sorely tempted. That would be as far as that got, I’m not completely insane, but if I did it while Lucrecia was present, she would think the wrong thing, believe the wrong thing.

  “I’d just like to make one thing clear, though,” I said sternly. “She is mine, not yours. What she learns is for me to teach her, how she evolves is to serve me, not you. Not either of you, Margaret. She is not a test subject.”

  “One little poke, a couple of blood samples to see if the change in the blood happens. If new babies are different and that’s why they can’t process blood freely.”

  “It’s magic, Margaret,” Lucrecia said. “If a Maker dies with a baby vampire, the baby is free of the weaning. So, it must be magic.”

  “Please, Quin,” Margaret said to me.

  “If we all live through this night, then you may ask her. I will not obligate her to serve to your whims.”

  With one final graze of my fingers over her hair, I walked away from Helen. It physically hurt to do so, but I knew she would prefer it if I weren't the one to wash her.

  I wasn’t certain how mortals felt about being washed while they were passed out, but I doubted it would be a joyous reaction. At least we had a good reason for doing it, what with the health of the human race at stake.

  “This is medically necessary, right?” I asked as Balor walked into the room.

  “We don’t know if it’s been exuded in her sweat,” Margaret said. “So yes, I’d say it is medically necessary. If I could dump her in a vat of disinfectant, I would. Drown her in it too, but from those turned while ill, only those who did not immediately wash and change clothing have passed it on. We’d rather be on the safe side.”

  I made a sound and looked at Balor.

  “Yes?” I asked in a sharp tone.

  That was mine on the slab, mine that was bare to the world and all that was and he dared walk in?

  Balor’s eyes were on me, however. He even placed himself so that his b
ack was to the women as they worked.

  “You didn’t have sex with her?” he asked.

  “She’s had sex before with several different men. This is not then. Women have sex a lot more freely now.”

  “Did you also not check for medication?” Balor asked.

  “I was in her apartment. There were only over the counter medicines for headaches and the like. Nothing in her name or the roommate’s name. She was not on birth control either. I went through her purse just in case.”

  “Yet you took her word on not being a virgin.”

  “So?”

  “You never take their word!” Balor shouted.

  In the small space, it echoed off the walls, hurting my ears as it seemed to repeat back to me. Balor stood with balled up fists, waiting for me to attempt to defend my honour after his comment. The women had come to a stop, the water spraying somewhere around Helen’s stomach.

  “A woman says she’s a virgin. You take the virginity. A woman says she’s not a virgin and you fuck her anyway. If that woman has a hymen intact, this is a giant waste of our time.”

  “You could always check,” Margaret said.

  “If you touch her, I will hurt you in ways I haven’t even come up with yet,” I snapped at Margaret.

  “I said you could check. Like I’m putting my hands in her happy place.”

  “Margaret, you’re a scientist,” Balor said, finally turning towards the table. “For the love of the Lord, say vagina at the very least. And for all we know, thanks to this moron, it’s not a happy place at all. What if sex is painful for her? What then?”

  “There’s nothing wrong with her mouth, or ass,” I said.

  It occurred to me that Balor was bringing it up because he wanted Helen for himself. I had to clamp down on the urge to bite him to show him who owned who. Some other part of me was trying to eagerly leap into the physical world, to be helpful, to be useful.

  There was a rattling sound across the room in response to that urge, even as I struggled with it.

  “That there is a perfectly good baby vampire, made with a woman who is a promising mind, who will make a good immortal. One who is probably capable of making the transition seamlessly. Don’t you stand there and whine about it because I took her word for something.”