Bloodline by Joel Abernathy
15
Daniel’s estimateof how long it would take to set things up proved to be overzealous. It took nearly a week and a half before I was summoned to the laboratory where he, Rye, Bobby, and a team of scientists and soldiers were already waiting. Standing next to them was a fresh-faced human in the uniform of a VOICE sentry guard.
“This is him,” Daniel told the man, nodding to me as if they’d already been discussing me. That came as no surprise.
I took a step forward and gave him a polite nod. “Pleased to make your acquaintance.”
He gave me a curious if somewhat wary look and nodded in return. “I guess you’re the one who’s going to turn me into a super-soldier.”
I tried to smile, but it felt more like a grimace. “I suppose I am.”
The man looked eager enough, and his steady heartbeat suggested he was far from nervous about the whole thing. Mine, on the other hand…
“Go on,” Daniel urged. As kind as he was being, I knew better than to think his motives were altruistic. Not toward me, at least. He would keep this face only for as long as I was giving him what he wanted, and if that changed…
I took the man’s offered wrist, shame cutting through me like a knife. As I held this stranger’s hand, prepared to take away his life and soul, surrounded by a dozen others, I felt guilt deeper than I could remember in so long.
Daniel was watching me closely, as if waiting to step in. I knew if I didn’t go through with it now, I wouldn’t be able to at all.
I sank my teeth into the man’s flesh and it yielded so easily. He didn’t make a sound as his blood rushed into my mouth, but I could hear his heart beat faster, rhythmically coursing over my tongue. At that moment, we ceased to be two different people, and he became a part of me.
He gasped, and while I feared I had hurt him, the glazed look in his eyes suggested something else entirely. I forced myself to pull away, able to feel the veins around my eyes coming toward the surface. If I didn’t stop, the option might not remain.
“Good,” said Daniel. There was a strange tone in his voice. I had no more hope of reading it than any of his other moods, the one just like the other. “Now give him your blood.”
I raised my right hand to my lips, only realizing then how badly it was trembling. It was a struggle to remain in the present. The ghostly walls of that cell in Boston rose up around me, more tangible than the wide-open room with all its light colors and clean edges. I could feel Enoch pressing me up against the stone wall, his hand wrapped around my throat. So warm, and then so very cold.
I bit into my own wrist before I could lose the will, and time seemed to blur as the soldier, still so human, took it and brought his mouth to the wound. At first, he drank tentatively, but I could feel the shift coming over him as if some force had been pulled from my veins to imbue his. My head spun and as the cord of forced fate bound us together irrevocably, my chest was too tight to breathe.
It was a rare reminder that I hadn’t the need for oxygen, but I felt the surge of panic all the same. A snarl tore from the soldier’s throat and his eyes turned blood red. He was turning from man to monster before my eyes, and he opened his mouth wider, his newly lengthened fangs plunging into my wrist.
With a startled cry, I sank to my knees. He was no longer just sucking blood from the wound, but tearing his head, thrashing violently. All I could do was remain frozen, watching in horror as it happened all over again.
Another monster, born from the rocky soil of my soul. I had never imagined it was possible for a creature to be even more vicious than Enoch in those first few moments of new life, but at least he had remained himself. All the rage and entitlement, it had all been there from the beginning, merely amplified by his vampire nature.
This man was nothing but a shell of what he’d been moments earlier. The bond that had formed so immediately between us grew strangely thin. I felt tied to him, but it was like being bound to a corpse, the dead weight of his maddened spirit hanging off me like heavy chains.
“That’s enough,” Daniel said, stepping in. His voice was a growl and for a moment, I feared he, too, had changed.
The fledgling didn’t respond to his command. He finally released my wrist, but before I could pull it away, he bit in further up my arm, this time hard enough that his fangs hit bone.
My spine arched as a scream tore from my throat. I’d known worse pain, but this was amplified by the raw, boundless hunger I could feel through our shared link. The fledgling’s stomach was full of blood, but he wasn’t satisfied, and I knew as surely as I knew my own mind that he never would be. He was now and would be forevermore a restless, wanting thing with a hunger that knew no bounds and rage that knew no limits.
“I said that’s enough,” Daniel snarled, grabbing the other vampire’s arm. He finally succeeded at tearing him away from me, and I collapsed forward at Daniel’s feet.
With a strangled cry of rage, the fledgling lunged at Daniel, my blood coating the lower half of his face like a mask.
Before he could attack, Daniel pulled the firearm at his side and fired two shots into his forehead. He dropped in an instant, still twitching, and all I could do was watch in horror as Daniel plunged a stake into his heart.
Agony tore through me, sharper than a knife, as I felt the bond that had so recently formed become severed in an instant. I clutched my chest, feeling as if the stake had been plunged into my own heart.
I wished it had. I wished it would have worked.
Daniel pulled the stake from the corpse, and it turned to ash before my eyes. Horror overwhelmed me and I lunged, ruled by grief rather than any logic as my fingers sifted frantically through the ash as if there would be anything left of the man.
Someone screamed, and it took me a moment to realize the sound had come from my chest. Red pooled in my eyes, tears of blood just like the ones the fire that consumed Jonas had burned away.
It was happening again, and although this man was a stranger, he was my child all the same. My blood. My soul. Pieces of me turned to ash were slipping right through my fingers.
“What’s wrong with him?” Bobby’s voice was strained, but it sounded distant, like it was coming from somewhere far beyond the room.
There was no answer, but I jolted at the hand that came to rest on my shoulder. When I turned to find Daniel staring down at me, I recoiled.
“You killed him,” I choked, looking up at him. He just stood there, cold and expressionless, as if he hadn’t just murdered one of his own kind. A newborn.
“He was feral,” Daniel said flatly. “He would have eaten you alive if I hadn’t.”
“He... what?” I asked, struggling to understand. All I wanted to do was close my eyes and have this all disappear, but there was no hope of waking up from this nightmare. I knew that now.
“Sometimes a turn goes wrong,” he answered. “It’s not common, but it’s not especially rare, either. There’s nothing that can be done.”
“You didn’t even try.” My voice was raspy, trembling as badly as the rest of me. By far the most horrifying part of it all was the emptiness in his eyes. He felt no remorse for what he’d done. No pain. Nothing.
“There’s no point,” he said, crouching down to take my wrist in his hand. When I tried to pull away, his grip tightened, making it clear there was no contest of strength between us. Not even with human blood fresh in my veins.
“Get the med bay ready, Doc,” Daniel muttered, looking over the wounds I had all but forgotten. The one on my arm was deeper than I thought, but the one on my wrist was even worse. Severed veins stuck out from my flesh and I didn’t know whether the white visible through the blood was sinew or bone, but either way, it didn’t hurt. Or maybe it did, and the pain gripping my chest was simply too great to notice it in comparison.
“He’s not healing,” Bobby said, coming into view. “Carter didn’t take that much blood.”
Carter. So that was the name of my poor, wretched child. The third I’d ever created, and the second I’d lost.
“I don’t know,” Daniel said, even though she hadn’t actually asked a question. He grabbed my arm and hauled me to my feet, a cloud of ash tumbling from my clothes. I didn’t even bother to fight him, just strained to look back at the stake and the ash and the blood.
How we ended up in the medical bay, I couldn’t say. I just remembered people pulling at me, Daniel forcing me down onto a cot while the doctor studied my wounds and washed them clean with some solution too viscous to be pure water.
I observed it all from a distance, detached from my body itself. At least until Daniel and Rye stopped talking in hushed, argumentative tones. Even if they’d spoken at full volume, I was too lost to hear or understand.
Footsteps came toward me like thunder and I realized the medical bay was now empty, save for me and Daniel. His eyes met mine, cold and appraising.
“Marcellus,” he called, for what didn’t sound like the first time. He snapped his fingers in front of my face and the sound jarred me back into my physical form. “Are you with me?”
It took a moment to get my eyes to focus on him. They kept drifting around to the shadows in the room. I’d never noticed them before. They seemed to move all on their own.
He muttered something in a tone of frustration and the acrid scent of blood sharpened my vision, focusing it automatically on his wrist. The sight of blood, as appealing as his usually was to me, turned my stomach. “No,” I said, moving away from him when he tried to bring his bleeding wrist to my mouth.
“You have to drink. We can’t try again if you’re not healing.”
Try again.
I stared at him in abject horror and when I was finally able to put it into words, all that would come out was, “I refuse.”
His eyes hardened. Sharpened. This was the shift I’d known was coming all along if I dared to defy him, but I would defy him all the same.
This was wrong. It had been wrong from the very beginning, but at least then it had a purpose. This was cruelty. Pure wickedness, and he expected me to take part in it again and again.
“You don’t get to refuse.” His voice was toneless again. Chilled. “You did this, remember? We’re here because we’re trying to clean up your mess.”
His words hit their mark, but if he thought guilt would be enough to bring me back in line with his will, he was wrong. I knew better than anyone what I’d done. The blood that was on my hands. There would be so much more of it if I did as he asked.
“Why?” I demanded. “So you can kill more of my children right in front of me?”
“The ones who turn feral,” he answered without hesitation.
“How many?” I pressed. “How many will you kill before it’s enough?”
“As many as it takes.”
The grief in my chest blossomed until there was more of it than there was of anything else. Grief for Carter. Grief for Jonas. Grief for the man before me who had no idea just how much of his own humanity he had lost in the attempt to preserve it in the world around him.
“I won’t be a party to murder,” I said firmly. “You’re no better than Enoch. At least he’s honest about what he is.”
Daniel didn’t respond, and his expression didn’t change. He just watched me for what felt like hours before he reached for me. Something about the unexpected tenderness in his touch and gaze reminded me of Jonas. So did the surge of betrayal when his hand tightened into a fist in my hair and he pulled my head back, raising his wrist to my mouth once more.
“I’m only going to ask you this one more time. Drink.”
My hands flew up by my face, trying to push him away, but he grabbed them easily and pinned them, along with my body, to the mattress. He seemed oblivious to my attempts at struggling, keeping one hand around both my wrists as he straddled my torso, using his weight to keep me down.
“No!” I screamed, thrashing in renewed earnest as Daniel tore into his wrist once more since the wound had already partially healed. Droplets of blood hit my face, and I turned my head. He forced his wrist to my mouth, pressing the open flesh to my lips with enough force to push them open.
The first time I’d fed from his vein, the desiccation had left little room to feel the intimacy or the horror of taking another’s blood after so long. The tang of his blood was familiar to me after drinking from the glass he’d offered on several occasions, but this was different. With every drop of his traitor blood that poured down my throat, I felt violated anew. The rush of euphoria that had always accompanied a feed, and all the arousal and intoxication that came with it, were soured and turned poisonous by this blasphemy.
Just when I thought there were no pieces of me left that were small enough to break, he proved me wrong. With his force and his righteous indignation, he crushed them to dust just like he’d done to that poor, innocent boy.
My attempts to push him off were in vain, and eventually, I gave up trying. I just lay there, letting his blood pool in my throat until he freed my wrists so he could clamp a hand over my mouth and massage my throat to force me to swallow.
I could no longer see Daniel through the blood, but I could feel him crushing more than just the breath from my lungs. For a split second, my vision cleared enough to get a look in his eyes, and I thought I saw guilt in them, but it was too short-lived to be sure.
When at last he deemed I’d had enough, he stared down at me, equally breathless. The light in his eyes spoke of the determination and confidence of a man who was absolutely certain what he was doing was right, no matter how wrong his methods might have been.
I knew his kind. I recognized him now. The ends always justified the means.
His gaze finally softened as he studied my face. “Why couldn’t you just make this easy?”
Easy! The idea was so grotesque it was laughable. I only realized I was laughing when I saw the concern in his eyes. The first hint of human emotion he’d shown since this awful thing had begun, and I knew it was only because he feared for the success of his project.
Daniel finally rose off of me, allowing me to turn over onto my side and pull my arm to my chest. The wound was healing as Daniel’s blood coursed through my veins, merging with mine and entwining our energies even further. More intimacy. More pain.
So much pain.
Why couldn’t it just end?
Daniel stepped back toward the door, but I could feel his eyes lingering on me. I didn’t have the stomach to turn to look at him.
Not that I needed to. Just like Enoch and Jonas, just like Carter, just like the dead sire whose name I had never known, Daniel was with me. He was part of me, and he would be until the very end.