Dark Ascension: A Generation V Novel (21 page)

“He’s in a good mood today,” Conrad Miller, his keeper, told me. I was standing in the keeper’s main room, with one side completely made up of the one-way glass that allowed Conrad to keep a constant eye on Henry’s condition. The rest of the room was dominated by Conrad’s computer setup, and of course Conrad himself, who was built along the lines of a gladiator.

“How can you tell?” I asked, looking through the window. Henry’s prison was a clear cube of incredibly tough plastic, reinforced on the door and wall seams with enough steel to make it resistant even to a vampire. Inside, Henry was strapped to a gurney at all points, so that he wouldn’t even be able to lift his head. His current physical condition necessitated the use of a feeding tube, and a catheter, and even occasionally some dialysis, and no one dared trust Henry around anything that could hold a sharp edge. The first time I’d seen a Hannibal Lector movie, I didn’t realize at first that it was meant to be frightening and bizarre—after all, that was the kind of setup I recognized from every visit to my host parents.

“He was singing the Harvard fight song this morning.” Conrad checked the charge on his stun gun carefully, then gave me a shrewd-eyed assessment. He hadn’t been surprised by my announcement that I’d be going into Henry’s cell today, even though I’d never done that before in my life, and for the entire few months of Conrad’s employment, ever since he replaced the previous keeper, Mr. Alfred, the only people to enter the cell had been either himself or Maeve. But around Conrad’s hugely bulging left biceps was a neat black band, a strangely old-fashioned gesture that I’d seen all the other staff wearing this morning, a dull black against the rich natural brown of Conrad’s skin. As Conrad reached into a drawer and withdrew a small case marked with my name, I wondered how many final instructions my mother had left.

He opened the case for me and showed me what was there. “The bone saw is electric,” he explained, “so you won’t need a cord. I checked the charge yesterday, and you’ll have everything you need. That’s for the skull, of course. And the knife is for the chest—you’ll want to start below the rib cage and go up. There are a set of tongs for removal.” Conrad paused, then withdrew a long, full needle. “This wasn’t in here originally,” he said cautiously. “I thought about it, and then I asked Maeve to put it together for me.”

“Morphine?” I asked.

He nodded. “Enough to drop a herd of elephants. Maeve put in triple what she usually gives Henry to knock him out when she’s doing a procedure. You don’t need to fumble around with a vein either—just use the needle to inject the whole thing into the top of his saline bag. He’ll just drift off . . . and then you can do the rest of it.”

“You know what I’m going to do, I gather.”

Conrad nodded again, his expression calm. “Your mother explained everything.”

“I’m sure she did.”

He paused. “You know, of course . . . I’ll be here watching, just in case anything goes wrong. But I don’t think anything will.”

“Why do you say that?” I took the case, feeling its lightness. It should’ve weighed a lot more, given what I was about to do. There was a carefully folded plastic apron, with a set of hospital scrubs, the kind that can go over clothing, plus a clear face shield, all folded and sitting on top of one of the tables. They looked much too big to be for Maeve, and I knew that they were for me, if I wanted them. But taking the case was bad enough—the last thing I wanted was to look like I was wearing a
Dexter
Halloween costume.

“He talks about it sometimes.”

I looked at Conrad, surprised. He nodded. “If he’s having a good day, and he can really talk. That’s why I wasn’t surprised when your mother gave me this, told me what to expect.”

“He isn’t scared?” I asked.

“Ask him yourself.” Conrad opened the door and gave me an encouraging nod.

I could feel Henry’s attention on me from the moment I walked into the room. He couldn’t turn his head—it was strapped down too tightly—but I knew that he was aware. I walked across the room, passing over the thick red line that was painted on the otherwise pristine white floor—until now, that was the closest I’d ever come to the cage. This would be the second time that I’d ever touched my host father—and the first time had been during Prudence’s murder attempt, when I was trying to haul him off Mr. Alfred while he’d been tearing at his keeper’s throat with his teeth, ripping away with a savagery that had been wholly animal.

A harsh buzzing sound as Conrad remotely unlocked the door from his observation post, and I tugged at it. It opened easily, releasing a blast of air from the inside of the cell that was stale and reeked of rubbing alcohol and the faintest hint of feces. Three more steps, and I was over the threshold, beside the gurney, and within his eye line.

Henry had those Boston Brahmin looks, the aristocratic features, and the artfully present touches of gray in the hair just at his temples that made him look like an ad for Touch of Gray. His face was much more heavily lined than it had been a few months ago—his injuries had clearly taken a toll. But his eyes focused on me, and a slow smile spread across his face. The fingers of his right hand began to tap against the surface of the bed—and the tapping was in the same rhythm as my heartbeat.

“I felt her die, you know,” he said, conversationally, as if we were picking up a conversation that had briefly been interrupted. Maybe, to him, we were. Henry’s mind had always been like a nightmarish hedge maze to me. He laughed, softly, but with real amusement. “I never expected for her to die before me. It’s very strange. Very peaceful.”

“What do you mean?”

“Her blood would always whisper to me. It’s in me, of course, and it doesn’t like it. But when she died, the blood quieted. I think her blood is dying as well.” He paused, and his brow slowly furrowed as he pondered. “I wonder what Grace would’ve thought about this. She always had interesting observations. She was studying medicine, you know. Quite radical. In her family, the girls were all expected to be debutantes, marry political men. That’s why Madeline chose her, really. Chose both of us.”

Grace had been my host mother, Henry’s counterpart. She’d died when she stabbed herself to death with a homemade shiv, shredding her heart into enough pieces to kill even a host, and she’d done it for me. Somehow she’d known that, miles away in Providence, I was in a fight for my life against a vampire named Luca. Her death had begun my transition, had given me the speed and strength I’d needed to survive that encounter. I didn’t know much about the origins of my host parents, besides what I’d picked up by inference or the occasional comment. I’d never really wanted to know, because when I was young I hadn’t thought to ask, and when I was older, I’d known enough to be frightened and disturbed by them. I’d never heard either of them talk about how they’d ended up being Madeline’s choices for hosts, and I paused where I was, curiosity tugging at me. “Because you were studying medicine?” I asked. When I’d been a student at Brown, there was a regular ad in the student newspaper, offering very sizable sums of money for semen and egg donations from young premed students—it wasn’t unusual for childless couples of means to troll the student newspaper for their biological building blocks, often with a wish list of SAT scores and physical features, though it had been unusual enough to request a specific major that that ad had become the butt of a number of jokes around campus. A friend of mine, strapped for cash, had actually answered the ad, though he’d ended up being rejected for being less than their ideal height of six feet. I wondered for a moment whether Madeline had felt similar yearnings—if she had, she’d managed to conceal her disappointment extremely well when I declared my film studies major.

Henry laughed. “Silly boy. No, I came from a whole family of doctors. My father, uncles, brothers, both grandfathers. Great contributions to the field. That’s what they expected out of me, of course. But I wanted to be a poet. Tried to change my major in college without telling them—of course the dean called my father anyway. They were old friends.” He tried to tilt his head at me, and was stopped by the heavy strap around his forehead. But the dark eyes that focused on me were suddenly far too clear. “You see, then, don’t you?”

“I’m not sure,” I hedged. Honestly I didn’t want to see.

“Madeline never explained it to us, of course. Why she chose us. At first I thought it was just a bit of snobbery—prominent families, good looks, that kind of thing. But Grace never agreed. She said that it had to be something more—all the fuss that Madeline had to go through to acquire us, particularly given the likelihood that either of us would die at some point in the process. Grace thought it was something in our temperaments that Madeline wanted. That she was hoping for something.”

I shook my head. “Rebelliousness? That doesn’t seem very likely.” My mother had been experimenting with me—she’d admitted as much to my face. But this was just patently unrealistic.

Henry laughed again, from his belly. “You disagree now, but think it over. You don’t get as old as Madeline did without being twice as crafty as a fisher cat.” His laughter disappeared, and he was gravely serious. “You’ll have time to think about it, of course. Centuries upon centuries. It does cheer me a bit, you know, my boy. When I’m dust and not one human even remembers I existed, there will still be that little scrap of me, that vestigial tail of humanity, walking around in you. Or flying. Do you think they’ll have flying cars? I’m sure they will. You’ll see them.” A faraway look passed over his face, and a smile tugged at his mouth, one that had just a hint of his usual mania. “Or not. If they blow up the world, of course, even the vampires will die.” Then, like a light being flipped, he was back to lucid and serious, the switch so seamless that it was downright eerie. “I know why you’re here, son. Grace gave you the first half of it, and now I need to finish the job. By finishing me.” A brief giggle, almost a titter, the kind you more usually hear when someone is half a dozen martinis to the wind, then painfully sane again. “You should do it now,” he said, the tapping of his fingers stopping as he curled them into fists. “That blood is dead inside me—it’s just sludge. I don’t like it—too quiet. Go on, then.” He frowned, irritated at me, snappish and upset.

I hesitated for just a second, then reached into the bag and took the needle out. He flicked a look over it, then back to me, that irritation remaining. I took a step toward his IV, then stopped. “I’m sorry, Henry,” I said, feeling the uselessness of the words even as they left my mouth. What did you say to a person before you put him down like a senile ferret that was peeing all over the house? I couldn’t even offer him a last meal, like a death row convict, since the only thing he’d been consuming for months was a protein-rich slurry being shunted in through his feeding tube.

The irritation melted from his face, and Henry smiled at me, sudden charisma and charm glowing off him like the sun for the briefest of moments before fading away, a small echo of the person he might’ve once been. “And what have you to be sorry about, son? Being born? I do appreciate you doing it yourself, though. Like Old Yeller, I guess.” He snickered, then pitched his voice high, imitating a young boy. “Yes, Mama, but he was my dog. I’ll do it.”

Anger flashed through me. “You’re not a dog, Henry,” I said sharply.

“No, I’m not,” he agreed, with the utmost gentleness. “A dog is a loyal, loving thing. Maybe I used to be that, but I’m not anymore.” He nodded at his IV stand. “Better go ahead and put that in, son. Sometimes I bite, you know. You saw, of course.” Slow pleasure filled his eyes, a fondness as he lazed over old memories, and there was the quick flash of his pale pink tongue dragging unconsciously over his dry lips. “Saw me bite old Arnold. What a pleasure that was. I was sorry when you made me stop.” His smile now was awful, nothing but teeth. “Is that what you need, son?” he asked conversationally. “To be reminded? Yes, I would kill him again if he was before me. And Conrad. And Maire. I would kill the whole world if I could—just bite and tear until it was nothing but an ocean of blood for me to wade through.” His fingers started tapping again, much faster, and I turned away from him and walked quickly around the table until I was at the saline bag hanging on the IV stand. Then, not letting myself hesitate for a second, lest Henry continue talking, I pushed the needle into the bag above the saline line and pushed the plunger hard, injecting all the morphine to mix with the saline. There was no change of Henry’s expression as he watched me, but he wrinkled his chin thoughtfully, and said, “Yes,” and his voice was once again so calm and tranquil. “That was what you needed.”

I watched the individual droplets of the liquid enter into the drip chamber, then into the IV line that led into Henry’s arm. “Good-bye, Henry.”

He watched me, thoughtfully, silently, for a long moment. Then his eyes relaxed, and the lids began to drift shut.

I relaxed then. Just a little, not even something that I even realized that I was doing at the moment that I actually did it, though of course that was too late by then. Because the moment my muscles made that infinitesimal movement, that my lizard brain decided that Henry was no longer a threat, that was the moment that he moved.

His left arm came up with a speed that wasn’t human, and with a strength that he owed to alien blood, and the restraint on his wrist tore. How long he’d been working away at it, subtly and carefully, in those moments when Conrad wasn’t watching, who knew? Who can say the patience that he must have exhibited, how much control he’d needed to restrain himself from attacking Maire or Conrad when they were in range, to wait until that moment he wanted, when I was near him, and my guard was down?

He’d surprised me, and I couldn’t move back fast enough. His hand grabbed the front of my shirt, with enough force and strength that I could feel his nails rip at my skin, and he hauled me down, down onto the bed, so that I fell across his chest, face-to-face with him, unable to do anything but stare at his open mouth, at those teeth that I knew could rip muscle from bone. Time stretched—somewhere in the distance I could hear a door slam open, and I knew that Conrad was running out of the observation room, coming with his stun gun to protect me, but he might as well have been in another state for all the good he could do me in this moment, when I felt Henry’s mouth against my cheek, could feel the heat of his breath in my ear, the power of the hand at my chest. I started to bring my own hands up, but I knew it would be too late, and I braced myself for the pain.