Dark Ascension: A Generation V Novel (22 page)

“I don’t want you to feel badly about it, you know,” Henry whispered in my ear, and I realized that the pain wasn’t going to come. I froze, listening to Henry’s voice. “I truly died when I was twenty-one, when Madeline changed me. This is just finalizing things, really.” He lifted his hand out from between us, then reached up and, with exquisite gentleness, ran it over my hair. I felt him breathe in deeply. “They never let Grace touch you, you know. I think that’s why she killed those doctors after they cut you out of her, handed you off to be carried away to Madeline. But I’m glad I got to do this, even if it’s just now.” His hand moved down, gave me a soft, affectionate pat on my cheek. “But do try to remember me sometimes, son. Just a little. Every now and again over the next half millennia. To a human, you know, that’s practically eternity.”

Henry’s breathing slowed, and his hand slid limply off my cheek, onto my shoulder. Slowly, cautiously, I moved my hands up, pushed myself off him, and looked down. His breath was slowing, until I saw his chest stop moving entirely.

I looked left. Conrad was standing in the doorway of the prison cube, the stun gun in his right hand, and a Beretta sidearm in his left. He was staring at me, chest heaving as if he’d just run a marathon, a mixture of horror and wonder in his expression.

“I thought you were a dead man, Fort,” he said, never taking his eyes away from my face, at the miracle of my unravaged skin. “Or that at least you would never be as pretty as that again.” Conrad shook his head. “Anyone else in the world in that position, and Henry would never have let them come up again.”

“I know.” I swallowed hard. “Hand me the saw, Conrad. It’s time to finish this.”

*   *   *

I felt it the moment that Henry truly died—after I’d removed his brain, and the moment that I pulled his still heart out from its place within his chest. When Grace died, it had been like a snapping inside me, and I’d tasted blood in my mouth. This time, though, it was like a lock was turned in me, and every muscle in my body tightened into a rictus that left me crashing to the floor. My vision blacked out, my hearing was gone, and that was when the seizures started. Then there was a white nothingness, and my brain shut off, and the transition was finished.

A week and a
half after Henry’s death, I arrived home to my apartment after yet another meeting with my siblings in Newport. I took extra time when unlocking the front door—cautiously putting incrementally more pressure on the key until I felt the lock disengage, then turned the knob with the kind of caution that I would normally reserve for handling fine china. I’d snapped my key off in the door lock twice, and ripped the knob off the door once in the time that had passed since my transition. I was slowly figuring out how to handle the increase in physical power that had suddenly been present when I woke up from my transition, but it was a strange process. After Grace’s death it had mostly been my reflexes that were initially heightened, with the increases in my physical strength trickling in slowly enough that I’d been able to adjust my day-to-day routine without really even being aware of it. This, however, had forced me to pay attention to all sorts of things that I hadn’t had to consciously think about before—closing car doors, turning keys, unzipping zippers, breaking eggs without smashing the insides everywhere. So far Dan had been remarkably patient with my sudden morph in a Hulk-like creature of destruction in our apartment, but I was really hoping that this part of the process would pass soon—particularly after the previous night, where I’d broken the
ON
button on the remote by hitting it with apparently way too much force.

The most frustrating part, of course, was that it was the oldest skills that were most affected, the ones that I did largely on autopilot. Whenever I worked out or sparred with Chivalry or Suzume, I had no problems, because those skills were new enough that I was always consciously thinking about how much force to put into a punch or a block. Meanwhile, I’d broken half a dozen pairs of shoelaces, and managed to destroy one of the grommets on my favorite pair of sneakers.

Once the door was safely open, I trudged inside. I was absolutely exhausted, but there was nothing physical about it—it was the mental exhaustion of too many meetings that had gone absolutely nowhere, and left me feeling that I could’ve spent the entire day sleeping in bed and accomplished the same amount. The staircase decision remained the high-water mark of cooperation between me, Chivalry, and Prudence. When it came to actually dealing with the decisions of running our territory, we consistently deadlocked on everything. It was that meeting chaired by Madeline all over again—unable to agree on how to thoroughly address any issue, our days were actually spent on determining stopgap compromise measures that just kept everything in stasis on the assumption that more time would allow us to actually figure out a real way of dealing with the issue—something that seemed, day by day, more and more like a complete fantasy.

It was as if, terrifying as the thought was, my siblings and I were a microcosm of Congress.

The attaché request from Gil Kivela had been put off by an agreement to ask him to put it in a formal written petition, in triplicate, as a way to buy more time for us to continue arguing in circles, given that it didn’t seem likely that Prudence would ever agree to it. The succubi issue continued to stagnate—I continued making regular phone calls to them, and there had been some bright news lately from Saskia when she’d reported that Nicholas had picked up some under-the-table work washing dishes at a local restaurant, and that she’d been putting up signs around town for housekeeping services at a cut-rate price. I’d told Saskia that it was still my goal to get them to the casino towns of Connecticut, but I knew that they’d started to give up hope of that when she told me, in a purposefully bright tone, that if they were still in the town in the spring, they’d figured that they could get some jobs doing basic yard work. Meanwhile, the adults were taking turns driving to the Newark Airport to hunt—which was something that no amount of forced optimism could make sound anything other than truly grim.

My mind was briefly pulled from the depressing state of affairs as I put the portable picnic cooler I was carrying on the kitchen countertop. The completion of my transition had altered my digestive system, meaning that I could now process human blood successfully—and was, in fact, now reliant on it for my continued health. I hadn’t drunk directly from a person’s vein yet—though I knew that it wouldn’t be much longer before I had to, as adult vampires had to do that every fifteen days or so or risk dangerous effects—but I had been drinking human blood. Every other day I had carefully poured out an eight-ounce cup in the morning, then another in the evening, and drunk it down like a particularly disgusting medicine. I’d tried waiting three days between servings, which was the schedule that my brother was on, but quickly discovered that that wasn’t going to work—I became absolutely ravenous, with a hunger that regular food just couldn’t touch. Just as my sister had promised, blood was not something that benefited from sitting in a fridge—after just a few hours in the fridge the blood developed a distinctly unpleasant edge. After one day it was awful. And after two I would just spoon half the sugar bowl in it and try to just down it like cheap beer at a frat party. I’d attempted to freeze it to thaw later, hoping that would make the process easier, but that had tasted just like frozen and thawed milk—utterly foul.

The only silver lining to the whole scenario was that I hadn’t had to try to find a human to provide the blood for me—my siblings were working overtime to keep me stocked up with the vampire version of take-home casseroles. I didn’t want to think about how many people they were pressing into service to donate a pint here and there for me, which my siblings were then obligated to carefully agitate to remove the clotting factors in order to allow the blood to sit in my fridge without becoming a partially solid mass—right now I was just more than willing to accept the help, rather than attempt the process myself. They’d been slipping me their efforts separately—just today, for example, Chivalry had pressed the little picnic cooler into my hand as he was walking me to my car—inside had been one of those expensive double-wall stainless steel thermoses, with a sheet of reheating instructions carefully written out in Chivalry’s beautiful copperplate and taped to the top. When I’d actually gotten into the Scirocco, I found Prudence’s contribution on the passenger seat—a Chinese takeout soup container filled with blood, with D
RINK
M
E
written on the top in black Sharpie.

I unloaded the thermos and the take-out container. Out of necessity, I’d had to try to figure out a system to deal with my new nutritional requirements, and that had involved buying three plastic water pitchers from Walmart—one was blue, one was red, and the third was Hello Kitty (I’d run up against a selection issue). For today, I took the Hello Kitty pitcher off our drying rack from where I’d put it yesterday after I washed it. I popped off the top, then poured in the blood from the thermos and the take-out containers, putting those in the sink to wash and return to my siblings. Then I replaced the Hello Kitty lid, and put the pitcher into the fridge, behind the blue thermos, which had tomorrow’s blood ration in it—the red pitcher was at the front of the row, closest to the door, and I knew that it had just a few sips’ worth of blood left it in, just on the edge of being completely undrinkable, but enough to offer a quick supplement for what would otherwise have been my bloodless day.

It was definitely a very weird new normal. Though if I could’ve stuck with this level forever, I would’ve taken it. At least the minutiae of managing my blood, and figuring out how not to rip the tabs off my zippers, had some kind of frame of reference. But I knew that all too soon I was going to have to take that last step and feed directly from a human. It was my own personal Rubicon, which once I crossed I could never come back from. Both Chivalry and Prudence had offered to help me—Chivalry with all the delicacy and tenderness one could ask for, Prudence with all the blunt eagerness for expedience to ensure a truly scarring experience.

I’d turned them both down. I would handle it myself, I’d told them. In my own way.

I just didn’t know exactly what that way was, or when I would be ready for it.

I started washing out the containers (for a guy who ate human organ meat, Dan had been pretty unrelenting in his proposal of a new apartment rule about the immediate cleaning of any containers that had previously held blood), then stopped and mentally kicked myself. I pulled open one of the drawers and withdrew a stack of Post-it notes, all of which had the following message prewritten on them:

FORT’S PROTEIN SHAKE—PLEASE DON’T DRINK.

I pulled one off the stack and slapped it on the side of the Hello Kitty pitcher.

Between my blood pitchers and Dan’s human organ meat, our fridge situation had become a little stressful given Jaison’s regular time in the apartment. Dan had never been overly worried about Jaison delving into the fridge drawer that contained his organ meats—all carefully wrapped in butcher paper and looking completely innocuous from the outside—but the leftover situation had been a concern. The ghoul’s approach had been impressively straightforward—he’d labeled any leftovers with human contents as “property of Fortitude Scott” and had told Jaison that I was freaky when it came to personal food properties, and relied on good manners to do the rest. My one request in that situation had been for Dan to use only opaque Tupperware containers to store those items—both for my own comfort (I admitted to being more than a little squeamish about shepherd’s pie that contained human liver), and to avoid the embarrassment of Jaison thinking that I was a backsliding vegetarian.

I did sometimes stumble in my vegetarianism, but on those occasions I tried to at least admit it. But I refused to take the shame of the side-eye that nonvegetarians were always eager to bestow on those they saw as backsliders when I had in fact not engaged in the practice.

The addition of the blood to our fridge had necessitated a serious roommate summit discussion, with the outcome being the official lie that I had integrated a new, absolutely disgusting, protein drink into my fitness routine. Dan had assured Jaison that I’d forced him to try it, and that it had been like drinking raw sewage mixed with Moxie soda—a description that we’d agreed would keep any rational person from asking for a taste.

After one last check to make certain that the Post-it notes were prominently displayed in a way that could not be ignored, I pulled out the other addition to our fridge since my transition—the bag of baby carrots. Over the past several days, I had been unable to ignore the increasing soreness in my upper jaw and teeth. It had left me in a distinctly crabby mood, in addition to the personal surprise about the sharp increase in my saliva output (i.e., I was drooling like a leaky water hydrant). I was very unfortunately aware of the problem—I was teething. Specifically, my body was preparing to grow in my adult vampire teeth, which I’d been assured (by my siblings, with a notable lack of sympathy) would actually take a few months. In the meantime, I found myself preferring to gnaw on cool, hard things, like baby carrots, which I discovered was actually fairly soothing and distracting, in addition to adding to the healthiness of my diet. I’d also made a surreptitious trip to the grocery store and stocked up on frozen Popsicles, which were not healthy in the smallest sense, but were almost blissfully effective in numbing my irritated jaw. I’d stuffed them into the back of the freezer, and so far Dan had done me the great favor of pretending that he hadn’t noticed their presence.

I checked the clock. This was one of my free evenings, and Suze had told me that she’d swing over after she ate dinner. Since it was also the night that Dan had his weekly dinner study group, I’d been looking forward to this. I’d found myself, surprisingly, still employed at Redbones. When I’d called Orlando to make arrangements for my final paycheck, he told me that the replacement that he’d hired for me had just quit—apparently she’d been something of a musical connoisseur and had been unable to last more than three nights on the job until the constant mangling of musical notes had finally broken her—and had offered me my old job back. So far it was an awkward balance with the daily meetings down at the mansion, but the truth was that I could use the money, and I knew that the alternative was taking money from my family. Also, in the midst of so many fundamental changes to both my life and my very physicality, there had been a strange comfort in continuing the old routine of heading to a crummy job.

I heard the rhythm of shave-and-a-haircut rapped into my door, and moved toward it with a big smile, knowing who was on the other side. Even after my mother’s death vigil ended, I’d still been spending a lot of time down at Newport, so I’d missed seeing Suze a lot—some days the business of not agreeing on anything had lasted so long that all I had time to do was go to work, then come home, collapse into bed, then get up just a few hours later to repeat the whole process. And while Suze had kept me up to date by texting me every amusing YouTube video or Internet meme that caught her interest, it just wasn’t the same as getting to drive around with her, focusing on territory business in my mother’s name.

I pulled open the door, and there she was, a brilliant smile covering her face as she held out a brightly wrapped box, tied up with a neon yellow bow. “Hey, Fort!”

I stared at the box she held out to me, confused. “You got me something?” I racked my head. We were too early for Valentine’s Day, and my birthday wasn’t until June, so did that mean . . . “Are we doing anniversaries?” Panic rose inside me, and I immediately started trying to figure out what item in my apartment I could quickly wrap while her back was turned and present as a prebought gift. This would be made even more difficult given that I didn’t think we even had wrapping paper in the apartment.

Suze snorted loudly. “Ew, fuck that madness. No, I just thought that since you’ve been having such a crappy few weeks, I’d find something to perk you up.”

Relief rushed through me. Then I really processed what she’d said, and I smiled. We moved over to sit on the sofa, and while there was a part of me that remained cautiously prepared in case this turned out to be snakes in a can, the larger portion of me was just wallowing in the pleasure of having been given a present “just because.” I unwrapped a corner of the paper, and laughed at what I saw.