The Superiors (7 page)

A man was sitting at Cali’s table when Draven arrived. The hostess tried to show him to another table but he shook his head. He noticed again the length of her teeth. He wondered if she had to stop short of sinking them all the way into a vein. It wouldn’t be nearly so satisfying if he had to stop before he was fully inserted.

His teeth had begun singing by the time the man left. Draven sat down across from Cali. She showed no signs of recognition, and this irritated him. Her eyes were bleary, and when he turned her arm over, he found red welts swollen up all over the inside of both her elbows. He looked up at her face in surprise.

“I know,” he said sharply, frowning at her boldness. He glanced at the bouncer who watched their exchange, his face expressionless. The other two saps in his section slept, heads resting on their tables.

“How many rations does she have left?” Draven asked the bouncer.

“Two.”

“I’ll take them both.” He turned back to Cali. “Would you like me to close two of these?” He brushed his thumb across the most enflamed spot and she jerked so hard her arm almost rose out of his hand. He closed his hand around her arm and frowned. She nodded, her eyes defiant.

“Very well,” he said, sinking his teeth into the two spots without warning.

Her body went rigid and her eyes rolled back so only white showed between the lids. As the familiar bitterness flooded his mouth and his nostrils, he took Cali’s hand and gave it a gentle squeeze. After he sucked hard once to get the clog from the holes, he slowed to let her delicious flavor replace the bitterness of unhealed bites. He closed his eyes and let his mouth linger on her skin, leaving his teeth in and measuring off the flow coming through her vein. The wonderful pulse in her upper arm throbbed under his thumb, and he pressed into the flesh until he felt her muscle tighten. He relaxed his grip, remembering himself. His thumb massaged the area to disperse the extra sap that rose to form a bruise where he’d pressed too hard.

He withdrew at the last moment and swiped her arm with his tongue, leaving it on the two pinpricks for a few extra counts to make sure he sealed her properly. The redness and swelling remained. He hadn’t closed a lot of Superior bites, and he hated the bitterness an open bite put in his mouth, but the taste that came after made it worth the unpleasantness. With Cali it did, anyway. He felt better now that he’d eaten once.

“Yes, that’s right. I remember.” He put his thumb back on the swelling. She didn’t react beyond a slight wincing. The hotness of it, both repulsive in its warmth and irresistible in the amount of sap pooled under the skin, intrigued him. He looked at the bouncer. “I would ask permission to close the five remaining unclosed entries.”

“If you withdraw it will count toward your rationing.”

Draven frowned. “It is suffering.”

“We can’t be responsible for overdrawing her. We encourage our customers to treat the sapiens humanely. If they choose not to, it’s unfortunate, but it can’t be helped. It’s a hazard of the job.”

Draven looked down at Cali’s arms and grimaced at the task in front of him. He didn’t know if he could stand the bitterness of sucking someone else’s mark five times, even if he was able to have her sap afterwards. And he couldn’t be responsible for her. She wasn’t his sap. He would have endured the awful taste if he could have had a full ration afterward, but she would have to be satisfied with him closing two bites. Now that he’d finally made it back to the restaurant, he couldn’t waste the pleasure of drawing from her.

“Which one hurts you the most?”

In response, she lifted her other arm. He could tell by looking which bite she indicated. “I will close one more tonight. I’ll try to come back more often. You are…irresistible to me.”

She raised her chin and pushed her arm up toward his face, and he lowered his teeth into the raised pink mound of flesh. She gasped and pressed her heels into the floor beside the table when he drew harder on the vein than he’d meant. He let up. She was just a sap. It wasn’t her fault that he was in a lousy mood. He released the suction on her skin and let her sap flow into him at the natural rate. The warm sweetness surged into his teeth, spreading through his body and calming him.

When he finished, he experienced a sort of dumb thankfulness to her, as he often did when satisfied. He closed the punctures. Instead of releasing her arm, he pressed his open lips down on her skin and licked her without touching his teeth to her. After he drew his lips closed on the wet spot his tongue had made, he sat up and looked at her. Her eyes were wide, and she had a look of shock and perhaps consternation on her face.

“Was that proper enough for you?”

He raised an eyebrow and gave her a half-smile, and for once she seemed at a loss for words. At least she amused him. Usually when saps talked to him, he thought his heart would stop beating out of sheer boredom if it hadn’t already stopped.

He had a strange urge to pet Cali, as he had when she was eleven and terrified. He’d never wanted to pet a sap who wasn’t scared before. But she had the same amusing quality about her that made him want to pet a dog, even though he disliked the warmth of them as much as the saps’. He stood and ruffled Cali’s hair.

“I’ve acquired quite a taste for you, Cali Youngblood. I will return to you.” He accepted his punch card from the bouncer, then pushed it back. “That one,” he said, gesturing to the sleeping sap at the next table. “I don’t have time to find something more to my liking.”

He sat and drew the arm of the sleeping sapien. She didn’t smell half as enticing as Cali, but at least she wasn’t laced with pharmaceuticals. He flicked her arm until the vein rose up, and he pierced it expertly. She kept her head down on the table the whole time.

Draven lifted his eyes and met Cali’s. Instead of leaving as soon as her shift ended, Cali sat and watched until he finished. She rose to leave when he did and met his eyes instead of looking down. Her lack of fear surprised him. Perhaps he should take offense. But he didn’t feel offended. He shrugged it off and turned to leave through the front of the restaurant as Cali turned towards the back where the saps slept in a bunker-style room.

Chapter Ten

“They really are filthy and disgusting animals. I didn’t realize what filth they are comfortable with until I bought my first one. And their smell is putrid. I don’t even like to enter their quarters it smells so bad. The thought of penetrating one of them is…I can’t…fathom.”

“There is no end to the perversity of man.”

“Well spoken, inspector. Well spoken. I tell you, I have a friend who admitted once that he fantasized about it, and to this day I see him differently. And he never acted on it. I mean, those poor pathetic creatures. They’re so helpless. I once bought one for her smell alone, and when I had to eat she screamed. It’s the worst sound. I sold her immediately. I prefer the silent ones.”

“I couldn’t agree more,” Draven said, glad to find more common ground with his new friend. Byron had even more disgust for saps than Draven.

“I’ve found that the longer I own them, the less I can tolerate them. I try to make contact as brief as possible. Check mate.”

“One of these days, I’ll win a game.” Draven barely glanced at the screen on the table top. Byron always won. He didn’t need to cheat.

“You’re welcome to keep trying.” Byron leaned back and smiled. “I’d better get home. My wife is back from a long absence tonight.”

“Your wife?” What a strange word. Draven couldn’t remember the last time he’d used it. He could hardly remember what it meant. “You’re…wifed?”

“You must. I don’t imagine I could live with one woman for that long. Although perhaps it would be nice to have one readily available.”

After Byron left, Draven sat in his Mert for a few minutes. He hadn’t had a companion for some years. Sometimes he forgot the pleasures that came with having a partner. He started the car, slid from the curb, and turned away from his apartment towards Myrna’s. He punched a button on the dash and it began blinking. Her face appeared on the small screen below the button. He’d never gotten her out of his system.

The face in the screen went from a still photo to a blurry version of her actual face. He needed to get his screen fixed. It had been blurry since…since Myrna, in fact. “Draven,” she said, smiling with all teeth exposed. “How have you been? Still catching saps in the night?”

Her laughter still echoed in his mind after he hung up. He allowed his mind to conjure a few of the more erotic moments they’d shared before he stopped himself. That only made his longing increase. He drummed his fingers on the steering wheel as he passed from the business part of town, with the solar screens, ads and bulletins scrolling constantly across the building faces, to the plainer residential area where he lived. He’d climbed halfway up the metal staircase outside his building when he remembered seeing Lira around. He went back down one flight of stairs and along the balcony to her apartment. She opened the door on the first knock.

“
Hola
, Draven.” She smiled and stepped away from the door to let him enter.

“Lira.” He captured her waist in his arm, pressing her soft, familiar body against his. She circled his neck with her arms and kissed him. “Do you have time for me?” he asked.

“I always make time for you,” she said, smiling up at him without releasing her hold. He fought the urge to shrug out of her claustrophobic embrace. She had one of those smothering personalities that he avoided, but it had been a long time since he’d lain with a woman, and she was fond of him. “Just stay here with me today.”

He smirked at the ease of her consent. “Of course I will,” he said, having no intention of doing any such thing. He felt himself moving away, as if only his body remained with her while his soul drifted away from her trapping neediness. He pressed his mouth against hers again, and she opened her lips and let him press his sensitive teeth against hers. A twinge of pain went up into the root of his teeth, and then their teeth hummed between them. Next to drawing sap from a human, it made him feel more alive than anything else in the world. But nothing compared to drawing a perfect sap into his body. Nothing compared to drinking Cali.

Chapter Eleven

“Let’s go out,” Byron said, hooking his thumbs in his wife’s belt. “We haven’t done anything together for so long.”

“We’re always together,” Marisol pointed out, but she didn’t sound like she meant to convince him. People always had trouble believing they’d been together forever, since the Great Evolution. But Byron couldn’t imagine it any other way. He loved her, and that hadn’t changed in the two hundred years they’d been married. It would never change. She was as much a part of him as his name.

“Not always,” Byron said. “Besides, you know I can take an assignment somewhere else if you’re tired of me.”

Marisol smiled, and her unaffected manner reminded Byron all over again how lucky he was, and why he would never want to dissolve the marriage, although most everyone had done away with the tradition long ago. But Byron would never get a woman like Marisol again if he lived for two thousand years. And she’d been crazy enough to marry him, so he wasn’t going to convince her of the lunacy of that choice.