Blood Vivicanti (9780989878593) (4 page)

He remembered Wyn from Cellar-7 and he theorized that the human scientist must have somehow altered his body with the blood of the Red Man.

This hybridization fascinated Lowen. And his fascination became his obsession.

He searched the world tirelessly for Wyn and the Red man, possessed by the idea of turning his Sleeper Devils into Blood Vivicanti.

That was right around the time when I got their attention.

Wyn and Lowen noticed my photographic memory. Both saw how my ability might fit into their own personal agendas.

Lowen wanted to make me a Sleeper Devil.

Wyn wanted to make me a Blood Vivicanti.

Lowen sent those two men to get me, the ones who had chased me to the edge of the cliff on the night I fell and Wyn made me the thing I am.

I was wrong about those two men. They hadn’t been from the next village over. Their stench hadn’t been from booze or libidos. They had been two of Lowen’s Sleeper Devils.

Lowen had been watching at a distance as Wyn snapped their necks and then saved me from my fall.

The Dark Man had followed us to the mansion. He had found Wyn and the Red Man.

His new plan began to form: If he could not possess Wyn, then he would use me for a greater purpose.

Lowen’s plan started to take shape on the night that Theo and I ran to Los Angeles, when we walked on the pier and talked, when he drank the blood of that old man and I drowned in the tempestuous depths of the Pacific Ocean.

Lowen’s plan came to a head when he put Nell before me like food in a snare. He knew that I would not be able to resist her blood. He knew also that her blood would poison me to the point of death.

And he knew that, when I didn’t return to the mansion, Wyn, Theo, and Ms. Crystobal would come looking for me. And they did, too. Lowen’s plan was succeeding. They left the mansion completely empty and defenseless.

Lowen had orchestrated that whole night.

Wyn, Theo, and Ms. Crystobal dashed fast through Idyllville woods. It was night. The sun would soon rise.

Their worry increased when they called out, “Mary Paige,” and “Mary Paige,” and “Mary Paige,” and I did not answer them because I was lying half-dead on the edge of that cliff.

They ran through the forest, over felled trees, under hills. They could smell a hint of my scent. It was almost completely overpowered by the stench of death and decay. Yet it was also the scent of death that was not dead – death that was alive again and moving like some crooked animal. And it was everywhere, too, suffusing the forest and the village and the whole mountaintop.

They had no idea that a vast host of Sleeper Devils had surrounded them.

Ms. Crystobal had better hearing than us Blood Vivicanti. She could hear water droplets evaporating off a moth’s wings a mile out.

And so that night she heard something strange happening back at the mansion. She turned away from Wyn and Theo and she turned toward the disturbance at our home.

She ran as fast as she could back there, through the forest, through the village, and through more forest.

She had been prepared for almost anything. But she had not expected to fight Lowen’s entire host of Sleeper Devils all alone.

Wyn and Theo grew desperate to find me. I had become their little sister. I had never been anyone’s little sister before. I had never been loved like that before.

Right before daybreak they found me on the edge of the cliff, right where Nell and Lowen had abandoned me, right where I had first fallen and began my sojourn along the way of the Blood Vivicanti.

I was on the point of death, it seemed. A foul stench was all about me. Wyn and Theo struggled to resist their gag reflexes.

They stared incredulously at the black blood (or was that bile?) trickling down from the corners of my mouth.

Theo lifted me up and hurried back to the mansion.

Wyn ran ahead to prepare his laboratory

They both paused at the mansion’s gate. It had been completely torn down.

Wyn noticed in the distance that the host of Sleeper Devils was charging into the mansion – Sleeper Devils of all kinds, old and young, men and women and children, weak, strong, agile and limping. They all moved as one body moving with one purpose, rushing through the grand doors.

Ms. Crystobal fought them with a speed faster than a Blood Vivicanti, but there were too many. Her black uniform tore, strands of her hair fell out of place, yet she had not one scratch.

Wyn and Theo fought them too. But the Sleeper Devils did not stop. They kept coming and coming and coming. Lowen had made an endless host of mindless slaves.

The Sleeper Devils destroyed almost the whole lower level of the mansion. They swarmed down into the laboratory. Nothing sacred remained.

Then they took the Red Man.

They took the Origin Blood.

Theo placed me in my upstairs chamber. It had not been harmed. Ms. Crystobal bathed me and watched over me while Wyn and Theo chased after Lowen’s Sleeper Devils.

They ran through the darkness. They ran until daybreak. They hid behind trees in a dark snow-filled forest. They raced after motorcycles. They clung to the hoods of cars. They leaped from rooftop to rooftop. They swung from billboards and power lines.

More Sleeper Devils met Wyn and Theo, and then there were more and more, and then there were more and more and more. Lowen’s obsession to turn his Sleeper Devils into Blood Vivicanti had driven him to turn (so it seemed) an entire city into his slaves – teachers, traders, mechanics, bankers, police, thieves, realtors, beggars, doctors, painters, lawyers, housekeepers, homemakers, librarians, carpenters, pharmacists – anyone and everyone, of all walks of life.

Lowen was bound and determined to capture and keep the Red Man.

The Sleeper Devils carried the Red Man into a darkened city. It was vast and deserted.

They rushed him inside a very tall building. It was so tall that it dwarfed the other buildings in the city. It had almost two hundred floors. Dark clouds wreathed the top. Its base took up twenty city blocks. All its windows and walls were black and smooth.

The city, its buildings, and its citizens, they all belonged to Lowen. Every block was peopled with his Sleeper Devils.

Wyn and Theo tried to enter this behemoth building, but the Dark Man had been prepared for them. Bullets and cannons and lasers and snarling dogs chased away the two Blood Vivicanti.

Wyn and Theo returned to the mansion.

Wyn spent the next day taking care of me and looking through the wreckage of his library and laboratory. Those were his favorite rooms in the house, not to mention Game Room Three, which the Sleeper Devils did not touch. Thankfully.

In the meantime Theo and Ms. Crystobal hatched a plot to rescue the Red Man. They never told Wyn about it. They wrote him a note before they sneaked from the mansion. They didn’t want him coming with them because he looked a little too much like his mansion – broken and sad.

The note read:

Gone to save the Red Man.

There’s meatloaf in the fridge for dinner
.

Nell – that poor girl – was a witch’s cauldron of inward torment. Her Blood Memories had been so poisoned that they rendered me unconscious for forty-seven hours, effectively anesthetizing me until my mind and my body had had enough time to process all that woundedness.

I would have needed less time to recuperate from the trauma of falling from the top of Burj Khalifa.

At first I did not remember much after gluttonously quaffing down Nell’s cold blood.

In fact, the next thing I knew, I was sitting up in my own bed, surrounded by my countless soft pillows.

How did I get there? No clue.

I was also wearing my nightgown.

How did I get into that? Again: No clue, although I really hoped Theo had something to do with it.

On the outside I felt very clean, as if I’d taken a shower. I could not recall having done so either.

Despite the fact that my flesh felt scoured of grime, on the inside – in my heart, in my mind – I felt absolutely filthy. I’d never felt that way before. The feeling was as nauseating as Nell’s blood.

The machine of my photographic memory was not working. It felt as broken down as the rest of me. And I did indeed feel broken – very, very broken.

It didn’t matter that I’d slept for days. I woke feeling exhausted, as if I had not slept a wink.

Through my bedchamber window the sky was dark and overcast. Rain was pouring down.

Before then, if I concentrated to listen, I could have heard movement for miles around.

But at that moment I heard almost nothing at all. Nothing seemed to be around the mansion for I don’t know how far – no mockingbirds warbling, no foxes slinking, no beetles beetling. And nothing seemed alive in the mansion either – no machines whirring, no Ms. Crystobal cleaning, no Wyn pacing back and forth in the library.

And the more I listened now, the more I realized that there was only the sound of absence. No sound coming from the village. No sound from the forest. No sound in the mansion. It was as if a black hole had opened in the sleepy village and swallowed the cosmic structure of my whole world.

Yet through the abyss of all that bleak nothingness I could also perceive the absence of one particular sound – Theo – he was gone.

I stretched the listening preceptors of my Blood Vivicanti power as far as I could, perhaps all the way to Los Angeles. I could hear the happiness and sorrows, the fighting and lovemaking, the dying and birthing of countless lives – yet no Theo. I could not hear him at all. And the silence of his absence seemed so suffocating.

Theo’s absence seemed to widen the hollow gap piercing my heart. I felt the urge to cling to him because I could not get a hold of my
self
. I could not tell what was wrong with me. I was not sure if I thought I needed more of his blood, or if I just needed him.

Where was he? And where were Wyn and Ms. Crystobal for that matter?

Moreover: Where was the self-command that I had gained by drinking the Blood Memories of healthier victims?

I could not believe that I had gotten desperate enough to drink Nell’s blood. – Even to this night I’m still kicking myself for letting my life get so unmanageable.

Theo’s scent was also gone.

In fact there was only one dominant scent in the mansion. I had never smelled it before and I did not know what it was.

Zounds! It was an awful stench!

Like an engine on its last leg, my photographic memory sputtered to life. Then I remembered everything – how I’d pierced Nell’s neck and how I’d drunk her black blood.

Her Blood Memories had been so cold and lifeless that her loneliness overwhelmed me. Being in them, remembering all that she remembered was like drowning at the bottom of the sea.

But in her Blood Memories I also realized that she was like me in some ways. The girl that I was before becoming a Blood Vivicanti had been a child searching for love. The girl that Nell was still lived in her Blood Memories like a cancer, growing deep within her bones, devouring her from the inside out. Yet she was also a creature who was so lonely, so bereft of love that my own turmoil was the sliver of a shadow in the dark corners of her existence.

Slowly, I got out of bed.

Slowly, I got dressed.

My head was throbbing. My heart was beating fast. I felt as though I might pass out at any moment.

I left my room, walked along the hallway to the grand stairwell, and I went down to the main foyer.

Everything seemed so normal. I had no clue that my world had been turned upside down.

I had planned to go to the library and then perhaps down to Wyn’s secret laboratory far below. But the sight of the foyer stopped me. It took a moment for my mind to accept what my eyes saw.

The main doors had been broken from their hinges. They lay in splinters on the black and white tiles.

The sofas and the tables and the grandfather clock were shattered and smashed and trampled underfoot.

That strange scent struck me hard. The whole mansion reeked to high heaven, as if a thousand unwashed bodies had come hurtling through there like some wild stampede. My hand covered my nose and mouth to try blocking out the overpowering odor. But it did not help.

Other rooms down the hallway also lay in utter disarray. The kitchen floor was lined with broken china and teacups. The carpet in the billiard room was torn apart.

The library looked like a warzone. Books had been flung from their shelves. Bookcases were toppled over one another like dominos.

The mansion had been completely destroyed.

Not every downstairs room was ruined. All along the floor were scuffmarks from boots and shoes and bare feet and…could a claw have made that mark? All the marks made a path from the main door to the library. The damage was mostly in there.

I went in, gaping in disbelief.

The library was almost unrecognizable. Books and shelves and bookcases were strewn every which way. Pages lay across the floor like scattered autumn leaves.

The prints had made a path toward Wyn’s secret doorway and down to his batcave. The secret doorway had been torn completely away – no, not torn away – it had been thrust inward by a tremendous force. Wyn’s two bat-poles that slid from the library down to the secret laboratory were now bent like flimsy wires. By all the signs, it appeared that a tidal wave of stampeding people had forced their way down.

I leaped down after their trail.

Landing on the floor of the laboratory was like landing on an impact crater. The floor had been caved in by the sudden charge of all those stampeding bodies rushing down into his secret lair like a wild river.

Wyn’s laboratory looked worse than his mansion.

Parts of broken computers had been scattered every which way. Little robotic creatures had been completely crushed underfoot. Some lay lifeless. One or two of the unfortunate ones lay blinking slowly with their last electric gasp. I doubt anything survived.

I dreaded finding the broken remains of Wyn and Theo, too.

Glad and grateful, I found Wyn in the vastness of his laboratory. He was sitting in so much dejection at what seemed to be the last computer console. A cursor was blinking on its failing screen, as if in DOS mode.