Dark Ascension: A Generation V Novel (20 page)

Chivalry was still just staring at us.

It was starting to feel a little ominous, and it was Prudence who leaned forward and asked, very cautiously, “Chivalry? You
do
agree with us, don’t you?”

My brother, that final beacon of good manners and fine breeding, hit his breaking point at last and absolutely exploded. “Of course I don’t,” he yelled. “That stonework is a one-of-a-kind work of art from a master craftsman! We’ve been featured in architectural magazines that have taken and displayed close-up photos of that staircase, and I know for a fact that there are at least four professors of well-regarded private universities that include pictures of it in their PowerPoint presentations. We are not going to destroy an amazing piece of artistic expression simply because the two of you find the sight of a naked breast distressing to your sensibilities!”

“Chivalry . . .” I blinked, trying to process what was actually going on. “You covered up the pornographic portions with newspaper when I was little.”

My brother adjusted his shirt collar fussily and smoothed back his still perfectly coiffed hair, pulling himself together. He slanted an annoyed look at me. “I also put our copies of D. H. Lawrence on upper shelves and locked up the rolling ladders. As I assume that you are not also proposing the censorship of
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
, I fail to see your point.”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake, Chivalry,” Prudence snapped, “this is not about defending artistic liberty. This is about how Mother hired an artist, gave him too much leeway, and then kept the result because she enjoyed how uncomfortable it made guests. It is the Egyptian Room all over again, and you are just being stubborn.”

“The Egyptian Room?” Clearly this reference predated me.

My sister gave her most superior sniff, one that usually came out whenever we got trapped in a family game of Trivial Pursuit and I’d missed what she considered to be an obvious question. Snobbery established, she finally gave me the background. “There have been several waves of Egyptomania in the United States. Mother decided that it would be amusing to jump aboard a brief one that rolled through in the eighteen eighties. She bankrolled an archaeologist for an expedition to Egypt that lasted three years, with the only stipulations being that he could go wherever and do whatever, as long as he brought back enough authentic items for her to decorate the main drawing room.”

I considered what I’d just heard, then ventured, “So she hired Indiana Jones?”

Prudence glared. Apparently pop culture references were not an appropriate frame for this conversation. “If Indiana Jones had ever returned with a local wife, two local mistresses, a depressing assortment of small children, and what I can only imagine to be a raging case of herpes, then yes, just like that.”

I pondered that particular mental image of Harrison Ford. Parts of it, I had to admit, seemed plausible, particularly when one considered the events of
Temple of Doom
.

Chivalry looked affronted. “Dr. Shearer did bring back the artifacts that he promised.”

“Yes, he certainly did.” Prudence leaned forward and fixed that gimlet gaze on me. “Fortitude, you may not know this, but there are whole basements in museums around the world that consist of nothing but Egyptian art and relics that they absolutely cannot put on display because of the explicitly sexual nature of the pieces. Dr. Shearer brought back seemingly nothing but that type of work, and Mother thought that it was utterly hilarious, and promptly decorated with it anyway. We’d be sitting in that room trying to have tea with callers, and none of those poor women could take their eyes off the wall mural of a fully erect pharaoh about to sodomize some poor handmaid. And do not even get me started on just how many individual pieces seemed to focus on male masturbation.”

Well, that certainly put our staircase into historical context.

Chivalry shifted uncomfortably, clearly not welcoming the vividness of Prudence’s references to the full frontal memory lane. “It was a very rich culture, with a fascinating series of creation mythos, some of which apparently involved masturbation. Though I’ll grant you that over cake and coffee it was a bit much.”

On a roll now, Prudence continued. “And we had to live with that for almost forty years. I cannot even tell you how grateful I was when she decided to have the interior of the house gutted and rewired in 1927. I donated the whole of the Egyptian Room to the Peabody Museum, and Mother didn’t find out until it was too late for her to do anything about it.”

“The museum actually took them?” I asked. “I thought you said that they had basements full of that kind of stuff.”

“I included a very sizable check, and the Peabody managed to find more room in one of their storage areas.” Ah, wealth. Prudence’s answer to every problem.

“I’m really not sure that the staircase is on that kind of level,” Chivalry insisted, but I could see that he was starting to waver.

Seeing my opportunity to deliver the unanimous decision that my brother craved, regardless of his own feelings on this particular manner, I saw my opening and took it. “Listen, Chivalry, you’ve said yourself that the staircase is a work of art. Let’s give it to an institution that will really appreciate it. I’m sure that we can find a museum that would love to incorporate it, or maybe we could donate it to RISD.”

“Christ, I’m going to have to endow a whole college to get that thing out the door,” Prudence muttered.

I ignored her, keeping my focus on my brother as I delivered the biggest carrot I could come up with. “And then, Chivalry, we’d need a new staircase, so you could support some up-and-coming architect who would love to design a showpiece.”

Chivalry visibly brightened. “That would be nice. Simone and I stopped by the Boston MFA on our last drive down from New Hampshire, and she really enjoyed the art deco exhibits. Maybe she’d be interested in taking an active hand in deciding on a new staircase.” The moment he mentioned his wife, I knew that I had him. Whether he was fully aware of it or not, Chivalry loved offering his wives the opportunity to put their own stamps on the mansion. Perhaps it comforted him on some level to walk past Bhumika’s elaborate rose garden, or Linda’s framed watercolors. There were hundreds of tiny little touches that everyone but him had either forgotten or never even been aware of. I remembered one moment when I was about seven, Chivalry had been hanging a swing from one of the huge, ancient, gnarled trees on the property, and he’d told me quietly that it had been one that his wife Irené had planted in 1902.

Prudence clearly also knew victory when she saw it, because she said pointedly, “And who exactly is paying for all this new work, Fort?” Apparently art deco–inspired architectural showpieces by up-and-coming artists were unlikely to come on the cheap.

I gave my sister my sweetest smile. “Well, I’d love to chip in, Prudence, but I apparently can’t touch the capital on my third of the inheritance until I’m fifty.”

Her upper lip curled slightly. “Oh, how joyous, an unfunded mandate.” She reached over and poured a glass from the mimosa pitcher, which had been refreshed discreetly by one of the staff members over the course of the long morning. “Well, however it was achieved, let’s at least have a toast to our first successful and unanimous group decision.” We all poured and joined in the toast.

I stood up and stretched, my spine giving a relieved crack. “Well, if that’s everything, then—” At the suddenly deadly serious expressions on my siblings’ faces, and a definite exchange of significant looks, I stopped. “Apparently not.” I dropped back into my chair dejectedly. “What is it?”

Chivalry leaned over to me and said, in the gentlest possible tones, “It’s about your feeding, Fort.”

I froze. With everything else that had been happening, I had, either consciously or unconsciously, overlooked this. “Mother’s gone, so I have no one to feed on anymore.” The words felt like a death knell. And they were, really. After a lifetime of being able to subsist on my mother, I was going to have to become what my siblings were—hunters, parasites, leeches. There was nothing benevolent about our feeding process, just corrosive and harmful to the humans involved.

There was no gentleness in my sister, just unyielding steel. “Your transition has been delayed too long already, brother. And now we have a timeline—you’ll need to feed again in two weeks. At your point in transition, any longer than that would be asking for an accident. This needs to be completed. Now.”

Desperation shot through me, and denial. This was what I’d feared and avoided ever since I was old enough to learn about my own biological inevitability, but if the time was now, then it was too soon. Anytime was too soon, actually, but I still struggled against it. “No, no, I don’t want it to be completed, not yet. Isn’t there some other way?” I turned to my brother, knowing that I was begging but unable to stop myself, wanting and needing him to give me a way out—an escape hatch, a magic wand,
anything
. “Chivalry, you’re over a hundred years older than me. Couldn’t I feed on you?”

My brother took both of my hands in his and looked me in the eye. He was regretful, Chivalry—always so full of regrets, I realized suddenly. Regrets over every dead wife, even as he married the next. And here I was, the little brother trying to fight nature itself, and he felt regret for me. “Prudence and I asked Mother that same question three years ago,” he said. “She told us then that we’re not old enough to maintain you, and that feeding from any vampire but her, even someone as close as a sibling, just wouldn’t be safe for you, even if we had been old enough.”

I struggled to process what he was telling me—not just that it wasn’t possible, but that he’d approached the question himself, and long before it had even occurred to me to ask. “You asked her this three years ago? So—”

A muscle in his cheek spasmed, just once. “Fort, having you at her age, maintaining you for so long after you normally would’ve transitioned,
plus
keeping two hosts for so long . . . it was a lot, Fort. It put a strain on her, and it wore her down. We both wanted to help, but she wouldn’t let us—not a single drop of blood to either of the hosts, even just to maintain them. She was absolutely adamant.”

I stared, and the room seemed to close in around me. “If it was straining her . . . I know she was old, but am I the reason she—”

Prudence’s voice lashed like a whip. “Don’t even ask that. Only Mother knew what her reasons were, but she chose her actions very deliberately, knowing more about their repercussions than any of us could.” She shoved herself to her feet and began pacing, irritation clear in every line of her body. “But it’s time to grow up, Fortitude. You are not Peter Pan, and this is not the end of the world. This is what is normal and natural for you, and I have no idea why Mother allowed this to continue.” Her voice kept rising as she spoke; then she stopped herself, forcefully pulling herself back together. The bond between us felt too tight, and I could actually feel it as she shoved anger down and forced herself into an icy control. When she began speaking again, it was in a carefully modulated voice, her hand resting almost carelessly against the sideboard, but there was no hiding the glow of her blue eyes, or the weight of what she was saying. “If you’re unable to finish it yourself, then Chivalry or I could take care of Henry.”

“You mean kill him.” Everything began to drain away from inside me, leaving me empty.

Prudence met my eyes, never flinching. “Yes. That’s exactly what I mean.”

I was the one who had to look away, from her, from my brother. I stared at the table instead—the pristine white tablecloth, the antique china that we ate off of with no regard because it had been in use in this family since it was new, the cut flower centerpiece that the staff members refreshed from our own greenhouse whenever the slightest hint of a wilt appeared. Here was all the beauty of the surface—the elegance and ease—and below us, down in the basement, was the reality, strapped to a table, fed from a tube. Henry’s life had been in my family’s hands, his death ours to deliver at a whim, since the moment that my mother decided, by whatever criteria she’d held in her mind and taken with her to the grave, that he would be her host, her Renfield, her means of creating one last child.

Prudence would do it, and with pleasure. He’d slipped through her hands once months ago, and I knew that she longed to finish the job. Chivalry would do it, if I asked him—do it with merciful swiftness, the efficiency that comes from always doing one’s duty. If I wanted to, I could be weak, and neither of them would say a word against me. I took a deep breath and forced myself to look up at my siblings. “I’ll do it.”

“What?” They were both clearly surprised, but it was Chivalry who spoke first. “Fort, you know that I—”

I cut him off. “I know you would. I appreciate it. But it should be me.”

“And when will this be?” Prudence asked, sarcasm and exasperation dripping from her words. “This is yet another attempt to stretch this out indefinitely, and I’m sorry to tell you, we simply do not have the resources to maintain—”

“No, Prudence.” I stood up again, feeling numb and light-headed. This would be the day, then, when I finally had to let go of my deepest dream, that somehow the transition could be put off forever, that I’d never have to let biology win and become that thing that my DNA was programmed for. “He never recovered from what you did to him, and with Mother gone, now he never can.” I forced the words out, and forced myself to accept them. “I’ll do it today.”

*   *   *

The process that transforms a human being into the particular hybrid that can create a vampire offspring is a punishing one. Over a series of weeks or months, the human’s blood is removed and replaced with vampire blood, until eventually no human blood remains. The human’s body is changed—it becomes tougher, stronger, and twisted all the way down to the DNA level, until the genes that are passed on are almost entirely those of the vampire, with only a few shreds from what used to be the human. The greatest changes, though, are in the mind. Sanity can’t survive the process—whoever my host father, Henry, had been before my mother gave him her blood, it was long gone by the time I was conceived, replaced with a mind that was broken and craved nothing but death and destruction. There were shreds of lucidity in his madness, enough to recognize me, for example, and occasionally hold a level of cocktail-party conversation. My childhood finger paintings were framed on the walls of the room that contained Henry’s cell, and, when it was on, the television was set to the weather channel. Henry seemed to enjoy seeing what the weather was doing—probably because he hadn’t experienced anything but the sterile insides of his cell for over thirty years.