Redlisted (5 page)

I shrugged.

“Shall we
continue?”

I nodded and fell
into step behind her.

Soon she stopped
in front of a set of double doors. “This is Master Radcliffe’s
office,” she said. “I’ll wait for you outside.”
She opened the left-hand door and flattened her back against it to
let me pass through.

The room was cold
and very dimly-lit. Books, papers, and unidentifiable paraphernalia
overflowed from every crevice and collected in every corner.
Bookcases cut the room into haphazard zones. Some kind of modern,
dissonant orchestral music played through unseen speakers.

I took a few steps
forward, trying not to crush anything underfoot. As Aya closed the
door behind me, Julian’s disembodied voice came from somewhere
in the stacks.

“Good
afternoon, Dr. Fletcher.”

He emerged from
behind a bookcase. He was shorter than I’d imagined, and
slighter. He looked less imposing than he sounded. His face was
young—he looked at least ten years younger than me—except
for his eyes, which were green and sharp as daggers. He was carrying
a thin, leather-bound book in his left hand.

“Good
afternoon,” I replied after too long a pause.

“Come with
me,” he said, turning to walk further into the stacks. I
followed him to a sitting area in front of an unlit fireplace
furnished with three long couches, each half-full of detritus.
“Please, have a seat.”

I moved some
papers from a cushion and sat down. He sat across from me, shoving
yellowing newspapers aside without caution, and stared at me for
several long seconds without speaking. His thin lips curled into a
smile. He reminded me of a co-worker of mine, someone I didn’t
particularly like. They had the same ash-brown hair pulled back in a
short ponytail, the same too-large nose, the same slight underbite.
The same affected, pretentious aura.

“You wanted
to talk to me?”

“Yes. Of
course.” He laughed. “You’ll have to excuse me. Aya
tells me you’ve already demonstrated telepathic capacities, you
see, and...” He trailed off.

Telepathic
capacities? “Yeah. That’s—“

“Impossible?”

I forced myself
not to roll my eyes.

“I imagine
this will all take some getting used to,” Julian said.

“Why am I
here?” The words came out in a petulant tone I didn’t
like. “What the hell did you do to me?”

“Let me
begin with your second question, Dr. Fletcher—or, may I call
you Adam?”

“I don’t
care.”

“Well, Adam,
you were declared dead a little over forty-two hours ago, back in
Baltimore. With the help of a friend, I had you flown here to
Georgia. When you arrived, shortly after nightfall, I revived you.”

“How?”

“Using the
blood,” he said. “Three drops is sufficient—“

“You can’t
bring someone back to life by feeding them blood. That’s
absurd.”

“Of course
not. Not normal blood, anyhow. But the blood of an immortal, of a
revenant—“

“You mean a
vampire?”

He laughed. “We
don’t usually refer to ourselves as such, but, if you like...
yes. Three drops of
vampire
blood is sufficient to revive a corpse.”

I shook my head. I
didn’t believe what he was saying, but there was no sense in
arguing with him. “Right, but, aren’t corpses easy to
find? Local ones, I mean?”

“You want to
know why I chose you.”

“You don’t
even know me.”

“I know of
you. I’ve been following your work for years now, reading the
journals and such.”

“You have an
interest in brain injuries?”

“I have an
interest in retrograde amnesia.”

“Wait. So
you stole my corpse and brought me back from the dead so you could
ask me questions about amnesia?”

“Among other
reasons. Yes.”

My mouth opened
and closed several times as I tried to form a response.

“You could
have at least picked someone with tenure,” I eventually
stammered.

“You’re
being modest. In any case, that’s not how it works. We have a
code of ethics, you see—“

“The undead
have a code of ethics?”

“We do, and
it’s rather strictly enforced,” he said. “As an
upstanding proponent of the Sanguine Consensus, I can’t just go
select a living heir and off them myself. That’s murder. We
select our initiates from the ranks of the newly dead, you see, in
order to avoid tampering with human life.”

He stood up,
brushed some dust off the front of his pants. He brought the thin
book he carried over to the mantle above the fireplace, the lone
bastion of organization in the entire library. It held maybe fifty
other black leather books, each the exact shape and size, in a neat
row unblemished by dust. He placed the book on the left side of the
mantle next to a bookend.

“Revival
doesn’t heal the body,” he continued, “so it’s
less ideal to attempt the process on anyone who’s died of,
say... old age. Cancer. Massive physical trauma.”

“I thought I
was in a car accident.”

“You died of
asphyxiation. It won’t prove to be a problem. Honestly, you are
an ideal modern candidate. We rarely see better.”

I didn’t
know how to reply.

“Did Aya get
a chance to talk to you about anything else?” he asked.

Human blood.

“Sort of,”
I said.

“I see.”
His tone was suddenly sober. “Perhaps she didn’t need to
say much of anything.”

I shrank against
the back of the couch.

“I’m
terribly sorry about your fiancée, Adam.”

“Yeah. So am
I.”

“I can
imagine this is all rather surreal for you right now.”

I nodded, troubled
by what Aya had said, unable to focus on much else.

He’ll
have something ready for you.

Something—someone—to
eat?

The crushing
sensation in my chest still hadn’t gone away. In fact, ever
since I’d seen the people in the hallway, it’d gotten
markedly worse. I ran a finger across my front teeth. Did they still
feel sharper than normal?

“I... well,
I understand what it’s like to lose someone important.”

I ignored his
attempt at sympathy. The impulses I’d had back in the hallway
were those of a murderer, and they had nearly overwhelmed me. If I
had someone waiting in the wings for me to drink, I didn’t
think I’d be able to help but kill them.

“I
apologize,” Julian said, chagrined. “I shouldn’t
have brought it up. I’m sure you’d prefer to be alone. I
can have Aya bring you back to your quarters in just a moment.”

I nodded.

“First,
though, you should eat something.”

“I’m
not hungry,” I lied.

“I
understand your reticence. The concept is gruesome,” he said.
“Come. I’m not going to ask you to assault anyone.”

“You’re
not?”

“No, of
course not. Come with me.”

I followed Julian
past several rows of bookcases to a study, far less congested and
much brighter than the main library. The room was outfitted with a
large drafting table with a black amphora at its center.
Amber-colored stained glass panels lined the ceiling, filtering in
what seemed like sunlight through elaborate iron filigrees.

“We must
consume blood almost daily if we wish to function normally,”
Julian said, propping the door to the study open. “That being
said, we can choose to drink from either a still or a living vessel.”

He pulled a chair
out from the table and gestured for me to sit.

I stood in the
doorway, repulsed by the idea despite the compression and pain
overtaking my chest. “What if I refuse?”

“That’d
be unwise.” He walked over to a cabinet against the back wall
and pulled out a single glass, crystal clear and shaped like a
teardrop. “Hunger manifests differently in each of us, but it’s
never pleasant.”

I swallowed hard,
thinking back to my reaction in the hallway.

He leaned across
the table to fill the glass with blood from the amphora. “In
the case of our family, the House of Mnemosyne, hunger results in the
temporary inability to form short-term memories. Acute anterograde
amnesia, in other words.”

He walked across
the study and handed me the glass. The liquid inside was room
temperature, neither cold nor hot. I forced myself to imagine it was
red wine.

He smiled. “If
you won’t sit, you must at least drink.”

I shook my head
no. I thought of throwing the glass against the far wall, letting the
blood splatter all over the books and papers.

The humor drained
from Julian’s face and voice as he closed in on me. “You
will drink on your own or I will force you to drink.” He placed
his hand on my right shoulder. “The choice is yours.”

I suddenly felt it
wasn’t a choice at all.

Refusing to look
at him, I brought the glass to my mouth. I refused to inhale as I
closed my eyes and poured the first few drops past my lips. I tried
to refuse to taste anything as it slid across my tongue; but as soon
as the first drop entered my throat I was already knocking the rest
of the glass back as if I couldn’t possibly drink it quickly
enough. For a moment, my mind felt perfectly clear; my body felt
buoyant. The blood was all I could imagine wanting. It was both
longing and release.

Julian released
his hold on my shoulder. He took the glass from me, refilled it from
the amphora, and handed it back to me with a satisfied smile.

“This is
your blood,” I remarked as I came to the realization, after the
last sip of the last glass.

Julian raised an
eyebrow. “How could you tell?”

“I... don’t
know.” I handed him the empty vessel.

As I swallowed the
last of it, I felt a rush of emotions all tangled into themselves:
grief, fear, anger, despair, and a potent, piercing self-loathing.
The blood confirmed everything. I was dead, and Alison was dead, and
if those facts weren’t hideous enough on their own, this effete
rich kid had turned me into some sort of hemophagic monster without
my consent. What had he called it? An immortal. A revenant. Not that
it mattered, now that she was gone.

The back of my
throat prickled. Tears welled up in my eyes, started to blur my
vision, but I choked them back. “How do I get out of here?”
I demanded.

“Aya can
show you back to your quarters,” Julian said, and began walking
me back through the library to the double doors.

{Anonymous}

I wake up on the
floor of the kitchen. Adam is crouching above me, the back of his
hand to my forehead, backlit by the overhead lights. His face is
fuzzy. Everything is fuzzy. I try to sit up; the room starts spinning
and I feel nauseated.

“She’s
still drugged,” he says. “Maybe I should have let her
sleep.”

Aya appears next
to him. “Can you stand?” she asks me.

I try to focus my
eyes. Didn’t she just get shot? She looks fine...

“Aya’s
an illusionist,” Adam says. “That was a trap, a mass
hallucination.”

A what? What the
hell?

“I’ll
carry her out to the car,” Aya says.

Adam nods and
stands up.

Aya slides her
little arms underneath my neck and the crook of my knees. “Hold
on to my neck, okay?”

I comply. I close
my eyes as she picks me up to avoid making the nausea worse.

She carries me out
into the cold night air. “I’m going to set your feet down
so I can open the door,” she says, and then she does.