Tainted Blood: A Generation V Novel (24 page)

I was feeling quite a bit less calm, especially when Prudence tied one of those rubber medical bands around his lower bicep with disturbing expertise.

“Prudence, you aren’t going to hurt him, right?” I asked as she helped Jon curl his left hand into a tight fist, making the veins in his arm begin to pulse.

Another eye roll, as if somehow that question were utterly ridiculous, even though we had just roofied this guy and were now settling him down within arm’s reach of a whole collection of sharp knives. “I have no desire to dispose of a body today. Mr. Einarsson will be leaving here under his own power.” She tucked another of those soft white towels under his left arm, then asked, “Now, Jon, you wouldn’t mind if I bit you, would you?”

He looked surprised, and a hint of mild concern was seeping through his bovinelike demeanor. “Bit me?”

“It will only hurt a little. Just a tiny prick,” she reassured him. Internally, I couldn’t help but root for Jon’s brain to make a comeback here.

“Oh.” He considered, and that flicker of self-preservation melted away like a snowflake caught on a palm. “Well, that doesn’t sound too bad.”

“You’re being so helpful, Jon. I do appreciate that.” Her eyes darkened, the pupil expanding to completely encompass the blue of her iris, and her fangs slid out. To my relief, feeding from Madeline appeared to have put my instincts back under control, and I didn’t have any overt reaction to this apart from a deep sense of worry and discomfort on behalf of Jon, and a general sense of being horribly conflicted about what I was seeing, like the time I went to a party and walked in on a girl snorting cocaine off a very nice coffee table. My sister leaned
down until her mouth was just above the bend in Jon’s elbow; then she looked over at me. “Now, Fort, despite what modern culture might’ve led you to believe, this is only as sexual as you’d like to make it. Just like eating a strawberry, or a hamburger.” With that helpful comment, and without further ado, she bit Jon quickly and neatly. He flinched at the contact but remained calm. My sister pulled back quickly, allowing me to see that her fangs had left two perfectly round, deep marks that were already flowing with bright red blood. She retracted her fangs, though her eyes remained dark, and leaned back down to drink, locking her lips tightly against Jon’s arm to form a seal. Just as she had promised, there was nothing sexual about what followed—though there were some extremely uncomfortable slurping sounds, and I could see her throat working steadily as she swallowed.

Jon looked over at me with those calm, pale blue eyes. “She’s right, you know,” he assured me. “It really doesn’t hurt so much.”

“That’s really great, Jon.” I said. Holy fuck, was this creepy.

Meanwhile, Jon was settling comfortably into social patter, as if we were at a cocktail party instead of sitting in my sister’s kitchen while she drank his blood. “So, what line of work are you in, Fort?”

I winced. “Well, I’m doing a bit of floater work for this small, privately run firm. Very exciting business model. Providing very specialized services to the home.”

“Sounds great,” Jon enthused, and I had a strong feeling that five years earlier in his life he would’ve appended that statement with a “brah.”

After just a few minutes that nevertheless felt even more torturously long than when Jon had been talking about money management, Prudence pulled up. With one hand she smoothly lifted the side of Jon’s towel to press against his wound, while with the other she dabbed delicately at her mouth with her white cloth napkin. It
occurred to me that my sister had made some ridiculous choices in her color scheme.

“Jon, could you hold that for me?” she asked, and he obediently reached over with his right hand to press the towel, while she untied the rubber band and dropped it onto the counter. “Excellent, Jon. Just keep steady pressure on that for a moment.” She then returned her attention to me and resumed lecturing academically. “You should feed directly from the vein every ten to fifteen days at least, and don’t stop drinking until you feel comfortably full. Usually that will be about a pint and a half, sometimes a little more. I didn’t take much from Jon today, but that’s fine because I fed very recently. I know Mother let you get into bad habits and stop feeding from her before you were completely satisfied, but you’ll need to understand that that kind of behavior simply won’t work when you feed from humans. Any less than a full feed, and at your age you’ll start sickening very quickly. When you’re a bit older, you might be able to go longer in between direct feedings in emergency situations, but ten to fifteen days is the rule for full health, even for a vampire our mother’s age.”

“Ten to fifteen days, gotcha.” I’d now seen my sister feed, and all I wanted to do was beat feet for the door.

She gave me a very quelling look. “That’s your minimum for a
direct
feeding, Fort, straight from the vein to your mouth. But that won’t fulfill your full blood needs.”

My heart sank. “It won’t?”

“No. One pint every three days will be necessary for that. Now, you can use the vein if you like for that as well, but here you should keep in mind the corrosive nature of our bites. The more each feeding source is used, the shorter the life becomes, eventually ending with full organ failure and death.”

“Like Bhumika,” I said painfully.

“Not quite. But you bring up a useful point.” She reached over to her box and removed the silver bowl
and another rubber band, setting both on the counter. Then she flipped up Jon’s towel and nodded in satisfaction when she saw that her bite had stopped bleeding and was clotting up at the surface. She adjusted the towel so that it now stretched completely across Jon’s lap, then settled the silver bowl on top of it so that it was nestled snugly in the V of Jon’s legs, with the towel completely draped beneath it. Then she positioned Jon’s right arm so that his forearm was resting across the bowl, underside up, revealing paler and somehow more-fragile skin. All with that very practiced air, Prudence tied the new rubber band around Jon’s right bicep, and this time he made a fist without even having to be cued, smiling proudly at his own cleverness. Prudence rewarded him with an answering smile that filled my veins with ice, and I almost flinched when my sister returned her attention to me. She didn’t seem to notice, focused as she was on lecturing me. “Now, like our dear brother, I imagine you will probably make a fuss and raise all kinds of objections to the human impact of feeding directly every three days, so I’m going to show you the workaround. Please hand me one of the clean lancets.”

Not trusting myself to speak, I reached into the box and removed a lancet, feeling the solidity of its silver handle, and passed it to her. She accepted it with her right hand, while with her left she carefully palpated and poked at the veins now bulging in Jon’s arm. Then she checked the silver bowl again, cautioning Jon not to let it fall. He nodded obediently. Finally, she rested the blade of the lancet gently on the skin of Jon’s arm. “Direction is important on this,” she said to me. “Always cut lengthwise, little brother. Otherwise you can sever the vein.” Then she made one deep, smooth slice across Jon’s arm. The blood rose up immediately, and she turned his arm carefully so that all the blood began draining into the bowl. All three of us watched silently as the bowl began to fill up, Prudence quickly untying the rubber
tourniquet and wrapping her own hand around Jon’s fist to encourage him to continue squeezing. When the blood level in the bowl reached the numbered sixteenth ring on the inside of the bowl, she drew the towel over the wound and pressed down firmly.

“Fort, if you wouldn’t mind setting the bowl on the counter?” I reached over hurriedly and performed the transfer, flinching at the way the blood rocked gently against the sides of the container and the way that I could feel its warmth through the bowl. “Now, sixteen ounces is a pint,” she continued. As she talked, she opened a side drawer, revealing a very thorough collection of gauze and medical supplies. She removed a thick white bandage, which she taped across Jon’s wound. “Be a dear and hold that, would you, Jon? Thank you.” Walking around Jon, she came over to me so that we were standing beside each other, looking at the bowl of blood sitting on her kitchen island. “Now, that slice was no more harmful to the good Mr. Einarsson than a visit to a blood drive, but it becomes a rather significant hassle for us.” Another cabinet was flipped open, and her hand emerged with a small metal hand colander, which she passed to me. “Start agitating the blood, Fort.”

“Um . . . what now?” While I often failed to understand my sister on an emotional level, this time it was very literal.

“It’s a bit like hand-beating eggs,” she explained. Prudence took the colander from me, dipped it down slowly to the bottom of the bowl, then lifted it in a slow scooping motion until the bottom of the colander just barely broke the surface of the blood. Then she handed it back to me. “Just like that.”

This was definitely a whole new level of weird, even in my family, but my brain was feeling almost bludgeoned by the entire exercise, and I just followed her instructions. While I continued the bizarre action of mixing a bowl of blood, my sister busied herself by getting her plastic
garbage can out from under the sink and changing out the bag for a fresh one. She brought that over and began positioning it fussily just beneath the area I was working. I watched her for a second, trying to figure out what could possibly be coming next, but when I glanced down at the bowl of blood, I nearly jumped out of my skin. There was something forming at the top of the bowl, something filmy and weirdly fibrous. “What is
that
?”

“Oh, wonderful, Fort. I’m glad to see that all that time spent working in food prep has had some use after all.” Horribly, I could see from her face that she was actually sincere in this compliment. She leaned over the bowl, smiling. “That, my brother, is a blood clot. Now, scoop it up and drop it in the garbage.”

Ew,
I thought, but I did as she asked, fishing it out with my little colander, and dropping it into the trash. “Um, why are we doing this?”

“Keep mixing, Fort.” I did as she asked, and she nodded, pleased. “Because we are agitating the blood, we are forcing the clots to form. By removing all of the clots, we will be left with a bowl of blood that is minus the clotting factors. In point of fact, we will have a bowl of defibrinated blood, which will remain liquefied and clot free when we put it in the refrigerator.”

As I had many, many times before, I wondered what horrible wrong I had committed in some past life that I’d been born a vampire. Surely a benevolent deity would simply have made me into a dung beetle? I scooped out another few clots, and then stared at my sister. “The refrigerator?”

“Just so.” She glanced down into the trash, where more clots were piling up, and sighed. “Of course it’s so terribly wasteful, to say nothing of the proteins that you lose by removing the clots, but there’s no way to store it otherwise.”

“Why don’t we just use bagged blood, from hospitals? I’m pretty sure that they keep all of this stuff in it.” For a
moment I wondered if I was being forced to whisk a bowl of blood out of some bizarre character-building exercise, like the time in Cub Scouts when they gave us cups of cream and made us hand-churn butter.

“Ah, a question Chivalry and I asked ourselves a number of years ago, as it happens. Well, what we discovered is that hospital or research blood has been citrated, meaning that they have added trisodium citrate to it. It has no effect on humans, but we both tried it, and it made us horribly nauseated. Defibrinated blood may mean extra work, but it’s far better than uncontrollable vomiting. Such a process, of course—all this work, and you have to deal with more humans. Ah, it looks like you’ve gotten all the clots. You can stop mixing now.”

I tapped the extra blood off the colander and set it down in Prudence’s sink. My sister was reaching into yet another cabinet, and this time she emerged with one of those tall, thick, 1980s Tupperware rectangles with the removable lid on top and the handy bunghole to pour with. My foster mother, Jill, had used exactly that type of Tupperware to make lemonade from concentrate when I was little, and I watched in a detached kind of horror as my sister unknowingly defiled a small piece of my childhood as she carefully poured the blood from her silver bowl into the Tupperware and pressed the lid securely on.

She looked at her handiwork and gave a little moue. “Fort, I am sorry to say that the taste of blood is most definitely
not
improved by sitting in the fridge, and this will be rendered utterly undrinkable in two days. And unlike revenge or a fine mint julep, this is not a beverage that is best served cold—you will want to make certain that it is body temperature. Microwaves can be a dance with disaster—I’d suggest sticking to warming it in a saucepan. But when you do, remember that it’s just like warming up milk—too much heat and it’s ruined.” She popped the Tupperware into her fridge.

“Okay, that’s pretty much seared into my memory.”

“I’m glad to hear it,” she said, with zero irony. “Now here are a few more important details—Chivalry drinks one pint of harvested human blood every three days, then roughly a pint and half directly from the vein from his wife every fifteen days. It’s my understanding that his wives watch their diets very closely, take vitamin supplements, and will usually receive a blood transfusion later in the day that Chivalry feeds from them.”

I looked directly at my sister. “And how do
you
feed?”

She smiled. “I drink directly from the vein every three days.”

“Do you . . .” The thought of those numbers shook me deeply, and my mind raced. “Are you feeding from multiple people?”

“Mother does that with her politicians. She must have a stable of at least a hundred, really. That spreads the impact, since she rarely feeds on the same individual more than once or twice in a single year.” Prudence’s voice became cautionary. “But she’s old, Fort, and her blood is very strong. One tiny sip and a human’s loyalty is hers—you saw for yourself how much of mine it took for Jon. Chivalry would need an entire glass at least, and I’d suggest that you just go straight for a roofie and knock the human out, or ask one of us for help. No, I have no desire to waste the blood and energy to maintain a stable. I’ll feed on our nice Mr. Einarsson every three days as I need, and when his health starts deteriorating, I’ll find a new source.” Still seated on his stool, Jon smiled at the sound of his name.