Blood Work (10 page)

I laughed.
Maybe he wasn’t such a fart after all.

“I’ll talk to
some of the others and see if they’ve noticed a trend to abandon
the young too soon.” He stared at the water, composed but
disturbed. After a moment, he shook his shoulders elegantly. “But,
we were talking about you and Mercy. As I said, your situation is
unique. I was wondering if you would allow me to observe you and
her together.”

Vampire
voyeurism? Ugh. “Nah. I don’t want to be part of an experiment. I
have enough issues as it is.”

Aurum studied
me steadily. I tried not to fidget. If he was trying to change my
mind, boy was he going up the wrong one-way street.

“As you wish,
but I wonder if you fully understand your situation. The danger
you’ve put both yourself and Mercy in. Don’t you worry about the
peculiarities of it?”

“Merce and I
are doing just fine.” I threw back the last of my beer and refused
to look at him. “Being peculiar is something we’re both used
to.”

The old man
made a noise in the back of his throat which could only have been
described as disappointment. It made me think I was back in school,
completely missing the point of a lecture and feeling like shit for
it. It made me want to beg his forgiveness.

And I hate
that.

“You’re a
smart young man, Mr Hawkins. Have you truly not discovered it
yet?”

“Well, I’m
certainly not going to discover it with you dropping worse hints
than a cryptic crossword. What was the point of this entire
conversation, Mr Aurum? Because it sure as hell hasn’t been a
welcome speech into the Society for the Kicking of Supernatural
Arse.”

He sighed,
another jab at my inner school boy. “Then I shall spell it out for
you. Each clan of vampires are the descendents of a particular
being. These beings are not, in the sense applied to the term
today, vampires. They’re something else, something older, bigger.
On a scale you’ve never even contemplated. We refer to them as the
Primals. These beings have never got on well with each other. You
might say there are long-standing family feuds between them. Each
member of a particular clan is a soldier in this continual war, and
it is also a source of strength for the Primal of the clan.
Strength is channelled through the psychic link between parent and
child vampire. All the way back to the Primal. Do you follow
this?”

I ground my
teeth together. Now he was just patronising me. Not to mention that
I wasn’t particularly liking the way he was going with it. Ultimate
beings? Wars? Fucking hell.

He took my
scared silence for understanding. “Good. Then you should be able to
add that to what you’ve already mentioned about vampires to me
now.”

I took a
moment to line up all my ducks. They were tricksy little bastards
and didn’t cooperate. I managed to grab a few and squeeze them till
they quacked.

“It doesn’t
make much sense for them to be abandoning new recruits then, if
they’re in the middle of a war.”

“No, it
doesn’t. But think deeper.”

“But how I can
see with the blast shield down?” I mumbled. Smacking a fist on the
table, I said the thing I didn’t want to admit. “They all have a
psychic link back to this ultimate vampire poobah. You’re trying to
draw comparisons between these Primals and their children and me
and Mercy.”

He smiled, and
it wasn’t nice. “I knew you would understand. Do you see now why
you’re so fascinating?”

“It’s not the
same. I didn’t make Mercy what she is.”

“Didn’t you?
You were there when she woke up. You guided her through her first
steps in the dark. You established a link to her. You feed her. You
tell her where and when to fight. Where is the difference?”

I pegged the
beer bottle at the railing around the deck. It shattered nicely and
drew startled looks from the couple of other people on the deck,
not to mention a yelp from the woman walking by on the
footpath.

Aurum stood.
“I can see that this conversation is at an end. I’m sorry to have
upset you, Matthew, but I felt you needed to know. This is a number
where you can reach me. I’ll be in town for a while. I’ll let you
know when I’m returning to England.”

He laid a
white card on the table and pushed it in my direction. I wanted to
shove it right back, tell him what he could do with it, but
something stopped me. It sounded suspiciously like Dr Campbell
telling me that pride and anger went hand in hand, and that both
went before the fall. Still, I couldn’t let him think he’d won.

“I don’t
believe it,” I said as he began to walk away.

He paused and
faced me again. “Then I’ll leave you with this question. What
flavour is Mercy?”

And he
left.

We all have moments in our lives
where everything changes. Something big happens, you flap about
crazily for a time, the score gets reset to zero, you find the
starting post and it all begins again. Learning that Santa Clause
isn’t real—or if you have a sadistic older brother like I do,
you’re told that Santa is really Satan—is one of the first for
most. Losing your virginity. That’s a major one. Then there’s the
potentially fatal ones. Drugs. Guns. Losing your temper in the
wrong place at the wrong time. Learning that vampires are real.
Learning that vampires are real because the girl you lusted after
for so long tries to tear your throat out.

I’ve had my
fair share of those moments. More than most, less than some. Didn’t
I get a break?

I apologised
for the broken bottle and fled. My hands shook on the steering
wheel all the way home. The mental blank I’d been trying for on the
drive earlier came in full force now, just when I didn’t want it. I
needed to think. I needed to collate and analyse and get it all
straight. I needed to find a reason why Aurum was lying to me.
Instead I have no memory of getting home, parking, going inside and
taking a bag of O pos from the blood fridge.

The first
clear image I had was of the cage. It was dark in the room. The
light switch was on my side of the cage. Mercy had no need of it. I
flicked it on. A little noise of pain rose from the bundle of
material in the chair. In the corner by the door, was a medium
sized case I’d stolen from my last job. Inside was all my blood
collection gear. I took it into the cage with me.

When my world
gets reset to zero, my starting post is blood. Specifically, the
elements of it, the working compounds that make it what it is. Red
cells, white cells, DNA, plasma full of proteins, enzymes,
antibodies, minerals, electrolytes—all the things that when poked
and prodded right tell you just about everything you want to know
about a person. Fascinating stuff, and a little freaky, when you
think about it. Blood was where I returned to after the accident
that smashed my knee. It was where I went when I got out of prison.
It was where I was when Mercy fell into my lap. Now it seemed,
blood was my whole reason for being.

Mercy had
recovered enough to crawl into the chair and haul a blanket over
her shivering body. It was about eight hours since I’d given her
the wrong blood group. She was nearing the end of the reaction. It
spoke volumes about how hyped she’d been she wasn’t comatose on the
floor. After Aurum’s little speech today, seeing Mercy in the
chair, cognitive enough to notice the light coming on, made my guts
shake.

“Matt,” she
whispered as I knelt in front of the chair. “I’m sorry for trying
to stun you.”

“I know. It’s
okay. No damage done. Give me your arm.”

She laid it
out for me, knowing what I was after. I put the tourniquet on her
upper arm and took several tubes of blood, careful not to get even
a small splash on my skin. The flow was weak and slow, its colour
pale. Only what I’d expected. I wrapped a bandage around Mercy’s
arm.

“Why are you
taking my blood?” There was a touch of accusation behind the
weariness.

“It’s not a
lot. I just need to do some more blood work.”

“Why? You keep
saying nothing changes.”

It never did
change. I rolled the bag of O pos between my hands, warming it up
and mixing it. “Maybe I’ve been looking for the wrong things.”

She mumbled
something and snuggled under her blanket. I tucked it in around
her.

“Mercy,
blood.” I put the bag on the arm of the chair. “Eat up. Get
strong.”

A little white
hand slipped out from under the blanket and pulled the bag back
under. Her head disappeared under it as well. I retreated before
she began to feed.

Once dead,
vampires degrade very fast. Outside of their body, their blood does
the same thing. It’s very volatile, which makes it hard to do any
sort of testing on it. Over the years, I’ve found ways to work
around that. I immediately put the tubes in the freezer, set a
timer for ten minutes and then went rummaging in my library.

I felt a
little guilty passing over the texts concerning weres but one kid’s
overreaction to his dog’s weird behaviour wasn’t that vital as far
as I could see. It seemed far more likely there was a perfectly
normal explanation. Like a bioengineered, behaviour-altering
super-bacteria created in some deeply buried government lab where a
disgruntled employee has shown ‘the man’ who’s the boss by stealing
a vial of their top secret work and then clumsily dropping the
dainty glass object when the ‘men in black’ closed in on him.
Perfectly normal and therefore not within my jurisdiction.

The vampire
section of my collected works far outstripped any other subject.
Which means I had about a dozen useless texts written by folks
who’d never even seen a vampire, let alone ever believed in them.
There were three books, though, that I took as gospel. They related
to everything I’d had experience with and a lot of stuff I hadn’t.
From memory though, they never said anything about these so called
Primal vampires. So I read them again.

It didn’t take
long. They weren’t massive tomes. The best of them was about thirty
pages long, the brittle, yellowed pages crowded with immaculately
neat but small writing. The language was thick and grossly formal,
but the information it held was gold. I stopped long enough to
transfer the blood from the freezer to the fridge and search
through all the kitchen cupboards again for food. I found a packet
of jelly crystals—jelly crystals?—and praise be, a bag of cheese
and bacon balls. Heaven.

Around one
a.m. I finished ploughing through my books and had to admit they
held nothing to discredit Aurum. I had, in fact, found a few hints
that supported his theory of ultimate ancestors. Not really making
my night.

I checked on
Mercy before leaving. She was lying on her bed, on her belly, legs
waving wildly while Will Smith and Martin Lawrence blew things up
indiscriminately on the telly. She said the lines seconds before
they did, giggling at herself. The room was completely righted. It
was always the first thing she did after regaining her strength.
When she came out of a hunger induced rage, her reaction to the
destruction she caused was a mixture of shock, disgust and fear, as
if she didn’t remember what had happened. Sometimes I believed she
didn’t.

I slung on my
camo jacket, reloaded the Eagle with fresh paintballs and tucked it
in my pocket, then with my little Styrofoam esky banging against my
leg, I got in the car and went to work. Well, it used to be work. I
hadn’t worked in a ‘real’ job for two years, not since taking care
of Mercy became a priority and waging war against the creatures of
the Old World began to turn a tiny profit. Or that profit could
have come from my lack of grocery shopping.

I parked in a
dim corner of the hospital car park, away from all the other cars,
which clustered around the lights of the building like children
afraid of the dark. It was a bit of a hike to get to the Emergency
Department, but it was either that or risk someone taking interest
in my car. I hadn’t left on very good terms and there had been some
mention of me never, ever coming back on pain of death, or
something along those lines. So I hiked.

Redcliffe
wasn’t too accident prone. The ED of the hospital wasn’t like the
ones you see on TV, most nights at least, and this was one of those
nights. I slipped in, trying to be unobtrusive, which is easy
enough to do when you know the tricks of the trade. Basically,
carry an esky. A few nurses looked me over, which probably had more
to do with my stunning good looks than anything else, but they made
no move to tackle me to the floor and rip my clothes off. The
security guard was another matter altogether. A discreet C note
passed along with a handshake solved that problem and I was on my
way up to the lab.

Don’t get me
wrong. I don’t like breaking laws, but outsourcing blood work on a
supernatural myth isn’t something you can just do. If I wanted to
have any chance of helping Mercy control this condition, any chance
of maybe doing something to help other people in the future, I had
to do what I could.

I didn’t want
to take too long, so I worked fast, spinning and separating and
processing. In under an hour I had a wad of printouts and the
sinking feeling that Mercy was right. Nothing had changed. Her
chemistries were vampire normal, her red cells were brutalised
little fragments, also vampire normal, and her blood group, thanks
to my intentional incorrect matching, was screwy. I spent a while
sitting at the microscope, staring at the disturbing picture of her
blood cells, slowly coming to the realisation that this wasn’t the
answer.

The
physicality of Mercy’s state of being wasn’t changing. She’d
survived the violent transformation, things were as stable as they
were going to get. I’d worked out how she reacted to different
blood groups and how to use that to get what I needed from her.