Blood Vivicanti (9781941240106) (5 page)

Who knows? Some day my
trucker’s CB handle might be
Large
Marge
.

There was one drawback,
however. The truck driver’s Blood Memories also gave me a peculiar
itch to listen to
Dolly Parton's Greatest
Hits
.

Thankfully a signal from
Ms. Crystobal came right as I’d begun to hum
9 to 5
.

“
Go,” was all she said to me
through her telepathic link.

I put the truck in gear and
I pressed the gas, pushing the truck to her limits.

What a way to make a
living!

Back in the Black
Building…

Nell and the other Sleeper
Devils held Wyn’s hands behind his back.

He let them. He was curious
to see Lowen’s next move.

Lowen led them to another
large office.

Unlike the last, this one
was not decorated in the Kharetie fashion. Nothing was egg-shaped.
In stark contrast, the office might have been a comfortable place
were it not for the medieval torture devices lining the
walls.

Lowen’s tastes were as
eclectic as Wyn’s. The mansion was the bright side of the Black
Building.

Nell and the Sleeper Devils
stripped off Wyn’s shirt, kept his hands bound behind his back, and
they made him kneel before Lowen.

Wyn studied Lowen’s new
host body. He knew that Theo was not there anymore. The boy’s love
for life was no longer a spark in his eyes.

He regretted making Theo a
Blood Vivicanti.

And he could not forget the
day that Lowen’s ghost possessed Aemilia. As if it were yesterday,
Wyn could still see the damage that the Dark Man had inflicted upon
countless innocents. And he hated the sight of him, even if that
meant hating Theo now. His mind did not doubt. Theo was indeed
lost.

“
Dies irae,” he said softly,
a requiem for Theo. “Dies illa.”

A strange emotion rose up
in Wyn. It was like a pang in the heart that made his eyes pool
with a single tear.

The tear ran down his cheek
and fell to the floor and splattered where it would be crushed by
Sleeper Devil feet.

Wyn was thinking of me. He
felt sorry for me too, knowing how much I liked – no, not liked –
how much I
loved
Theo.

“
Mary Paige is going to be
very sorrowful when she finds out what you’ve done to Theo,” Wyn
said to the Dark Man. “Then she’s going to erase you from
history.”

Lowen laughed. It was
Theo’s voice and it was horrible for Wyn to hear.

“
You should be proud of
yourself,” Lowen said through Theo’s voice. “You are the father of
a whole new race. The new Abraham.”

“
If I am the father of the
Blood Vivicanti,” Wyn replied, “then Clotho was the
mother.”

Lowen blinked in thought,
staring with an expression of curiosity at Wyn.

“
Clotho
was one of your so-called
Fates
,” he said at
last.

“
She was the weaver of
life,” Wyn added.

Nell, who never left
Lowen’s side, now looked up with her sad eyes, and she spoke in a
quiet and quite broken voice.

“
Clotho was the daughter of
necessity.”

Wyn tried to stand, but
Sleeper Devils on either side forced him back down. He let them –
for now.

“
What did you do to Theo?”
he asked Lowen. “Is he what you call a Sleeper Devil?”

Lowen bared Theo’s teeth
and hissed: “I ate his soul!”

Wyn narrowed his eyes. “Is
Theo dead?”

Lowen started to speak, but
stopped with second thoughts.

“
Come to think of it,” he
said a second later with a smirk. “I have no idea. I never stopped
to ask the question before.”

“
Do you have souls from your
planet?” Wyn asked.

“
When did you learn about
Khariton?”

“
I learned all about you,”
Wyn said angrily through his clenched teeth, “right after you
killed my wife, when I lost my soul making the Blood
Vivicanti.”

Lowen’s finger ran
lengthwise across his lower lip. His mouth parted slightly in
realization. “Why do you want to be more like the
Kharetie?”

Wyn shrugged and countered
with, “Why do you want to be human?”

Lowen chuckled. “I had
never heard of irony until I came to your planet. It does not exist
on Khariton. If it ever did, we lost the knack for it eons ago. If
it is there now, it is a new invention altogether. You have a
saying here: One person’s tryst is another person’s
trash.”

Nell raised herself up on
tiptoe toward his ear. “Actually,” she whispered, “the saying goes:
One person’s trash is another person’s treasure.”

Lowen slowly turned to
glare at her. His hand twitched, as if he might strike her at any
second.

“
I think both work,” he
said, turning back to Wyn. “The point is that you trashed what I
cherish.”

Wyn scowled at Lowen in
disbelief. “You don’t cherish human life.”

Nell looked up at Lowen, a
look of hope and hopelessness commingling on her face.

“
Maybe not human life,” the
Dark Man admitted. “But I do love human skin and bone and hair and
stink. Your bodies are so soft and malleable. I can stuff my
Sleeper Devils inside you so easily. I can possess you with even
less effort.”

A tear pooled in one of
Nell’s black eyes.

“
Yet,” Lowen went on
speaking with a new tone and a new thought, “the human body can
also be the greatest prison. Bones bar the spirit. Sinews
straightjacket the soul. Perhaps that’s why you escaped the human
body when you became a Blood Vivicanti.”

Wyn grinned defiantly. “Yet
I am still within this flesh and bone body. You have not eaten my
soul.”

“
Before all that,” Lowen
said in an amicable tone, “I just wanted a chat with you. After I
devour you inside out, the most I might get from you is groveling
and waffling. I want to learn more about you. After all, you remade
your prison cell into a paradise of strength and grace and
beauty.”

“
You’re one to talk, you who
hops from body to body. Are you hoping that one will anchor your
restless wandering spirit?”

“
Psychoanalysis is also
either extinct or nonexistent on Khariton. But I am fascinated with
this new experience.”

“
So
you
are
a ghost
from your planet.”

“
Ghost is a good
term.”

“
What would you call
yourself? What would another Kharetie call you?”

“
Beyond your
comprehension.”

“
Try me.”

“
Impossible. Humans have
only one throat with one set of vocal chords. And your single
tongue gets in the way.”

“
Come on,” Wyn coaxed. “Give
it a go.”

Lowen tilted back his head
and he crooned something that was not quite a screech and not quite
a yodel.

Wyn blinked.

“
I see,” he said at
length.

“
In your
language,” Lowen said, stepping a little closer, “you might call me
a
Nonlingual Omnidimensional
Respectralized Multisentience
.”

Wyn had not heard those
words before, but he understood them. He repeated them to himself.
He spelled them out. Then he abbreviated them.

“
N – O – R – M?”

Lowen shrugged. “In your
speak? Sure.”

“
So you’re called
NORM?”

Lowen twitched.

“
Can I call you
Norm?”

Lowen now glared at Wyn.
“Tell me how you make your Blood Vivicanti.”

“
Tell me how you make your
Sleeper Devils.”

“
You’re in no place to
bargain.”

Wyn laughed. “Of course I
am. Kill me and you’ll kill the answer to your question. Bargaining
is all we have.”

Lowen gestured to all the
medieval devices in the office. “I could torture you.”

“
To sleep?” Wyn went on.
“I’d heal almost instantly from anything you could do to
me.”

“
I could separate your bones
from your body and then eat you whole.”

Wyn shuddered. “That
doesn’t sound very tasty.”

Back in my
eighteen-wheeler…

I had gotten the truck just
over 80mph. Now it was starting to shake pretty badly.

Ms. Crystobal’s voice once
again spoke to my mind through her telepathic connection. “How far
along are you?”

“
I’ve been driving this rig
as fast as I can down the straightest street I could find. It got
to seventy quickly. But it’s now slowed around eighty and it’s
struggling to get to a hundred.”

“
If you do not get to one
hundred miles per hour, then our plan might fail.”

“
I’m givin’ her all she’s
got, Captain!” came my response in my best Scotty
accent.

“
What was that?” asked Ms.
Crystobal.

“
Nothing,” I said, feeling
that old sting of being misunderstood. “It’s a trekker thing. Don’t
worry about it.”

“
I’ll give you a few more
minutes. But then Wyn will be out of time. I’ll have to send
you.”

“
I’m not sure if this rig
can get to one hundred.”

“
Keep going,” Ms. Crystobal
said, and then added, “Kirk out.”

Back in the Black
Building…

Lowen told his Sleeper
Devils to grab Wyn and follow. They did.

Wyn went with them
willingly.

Nell walked beside Lowen as
he led them to one wall where there was one particularly
evil-looking torture device. It had several spikes and something
that looked like a rooster’s beak.

“
I wonder what you’re
capable of,” Lowen said thoughtfully to Wyn.

The Blood Vivicanti
shrugged. “My highest score on Super Mario Brothers for the NES was
fifty shy of a million.”

“
Certainly,” Lowen went on,
ignoring Wyn’s last remark, “you are much more than any mere human.
You could say that you and I are the same. You made what you are. I
remake what I am. The difference is that what you accomplished
once, I continue to accomplish.”

“
I like how you prattle to
give yourself time to think,” Wyn said. “It’s a much more effective
torture device for your listener.”

Lowen smirked knowingly. He
glanced toward the iron maiden in the corner of the
room.

“
The differences between
humans and the Kharetie fascinate me,” he said. “For instance, the
Kharetie have only eleven bones in each foot. But you humans have
twenty-six.”

Nell looked down at her
Mary Jane’s. She knew where Lowen was going with this. She knew all
about being broken.

“
I have
three PhDs,” Wyn said. “I am the only one in history who
effectively mutated the human genome into the
übermensch
. I think I know how many
bones the whole human body has.”

Lowen sneered at him. “Do
you know what it feels like to break each one, one at a time? For
all your talent, for all your acumen, for all your indomitable
willpower, for all your beautiful passion, the human frame
possesses no more and no less than the fragility of butterfly
wings. Once touched, forever damaged.”

The Dark Man walked around
Wyn.

“
I could take you apart at
the joints,” he said, “beginning with your toes and then moving up
to your soles. Would your soul be mine then? Perhaps not. You’re
strong, yes. But each time you refuse to tell me how your Blood
Vivicanti are made, I will break off another bone at the joint.
Refuse me fifty-two times, and we would only be finished with both
feet. The arms together have over sixty bones. I could go from your
arms to your thorax. Or to your hands! Oh now, the hands are quite
lovely. Twenty-seven bones a piece! You might have remade the
prison of your body into a Nietzschian paradigm, but you are still
manacled in the frame and figure of a man.”

Wyn raised an
eyebrow.

“
Did someone write that
speech for you?” he asked sarcastically. “Because words like
‘Nietzschean’ and ‘paradigm’ seem a little beyond your fifth grade
reading level.”