Called By Blood

Chapter 5

When she woke, she was still on the basement floor, but she was cozy and warm. A pillow was under her head, the quilt off her bed around her. The first thing she did was look at her arm. There wasn't a mark on it. She bolted up out of the blanket. Where was Alex?

"You'll be lightheaded." It was a stranger's voice, deep and resonant. It may have been a warning, or a command, for the moment he said it the room began to spin in giddy loops. Helena dropped back to the pillow and the room stopped moving. Carefully she rolled toward the voice and found a man with long blond hair cradling Alex in his lap. For a confused moment she thought he was an angel because he was too chiseled, too pale, too unearthly beautiful to be human. His black T-shirt was hiked up, his breast sliced open, and in a grotesque parody of nursing, the charred thing that used to be Alex lapped at the cut with a long, pointed tongue.

"Am I dead?"

The man lifted his head. His cool blue eyes were sad. Not momentarily sad, but habitually sad. There was a difference. He appraised her in a single glance, a knowing glance that was not exactly cruel, but so calculating and distant that she realized he couldn't be human. It was like having a staring contest with a big cat at the zoo. "Alex would not kill you to save himself." The angel man looked back down at Alex. "He's the best of all of us."

"And you are?"

"His brother, Mikhail." He pointed his chin at a glass beside her. "Drink your orange juice."

I'm having a psychotic break. This is what it's like.

No wonder crazy people never thought they were nuts. Everything was normal. It wasn't like the houseplants were talking to her. She just happened to have vampires in her basement.

Mikhail had taken over caring for Alex and asked for little from her. No one asked her to feed Alex again, and she hadn't volunteered. Mikhail—Misha, Alex called him—went in and out a lot. Helena figured he was going out and sucking on other people and bringing their blood home to Alex like a sinister mama bird. She tried not to think about it. Don't ask, don't tell.

That first night, Mikhail explained how Alex came to be burned and assured her he would recover from it in time, but he was closed mouthed about vampirism in general. He said she should talk to Alex about these things. Mikhail was a little scary. Not that he wasn't always perfectly polite, but it was he, not Alex, that made her believe in vampires. Or rather, vham-peers. Mikhail pronounced it that way too.

Helena puzzled on the differences between the two brothers. Mikhail was slick, precise, icy and startlingly beautiful while Alex was impulsive, warm, impatient and had been handsome in a more normal way. They did look a little alike—same chin and mouth, same ears, same hands. That was about it. Mikhail carried Alex as easily as he would a child, and moved with a flowing grace that was borderline creepy. Helena had to assume that Alex was that strong and could move like that too if he wanted. But somehow Alex passed for human while his brother did not.

Whenever Mikhail left, Alex began to howl in pain or hunger. She didn't know which. Working on a strict need-to-know basis, that was her. Unable to help him with either problem, she hid. She ran miles every day, more than she had in a long time. When she couldn't run anymore she came home and cleaned. She was working on organizing the garage. It was cold, but it had to be done. If she worked hard enough, maybe she could sleep.

All she wanted was for them to leave. She wanted her old life back.

She wouldn't call the police, because if they got Alex, he'd die. And if Mikhail got the police… Well, best not to hypothesize.

And that was all assuming they existed. What if she called the police about the vampire infestation in her basement and it turned out no one was down there?

Over and over again she picked up the phone to call Lacey, but always put it back down again. Confessing to Lacey might prove she was crazy after all, and she didn't want that. And if this was all real, why did she need to subject Lacey to the truth? None of it was anything she ever wanted to know. It confused everything. If vampires existed, what other movie monsters were walking around out there? And what did this say about man's place in the world? About God?

Research kept her sane. When the outside world made no sense there was a lot of comfort in book facts. When she was too tired to run or clean anymore, she researched vampires.

Not even sure where to begin, she waded through everything from dense literary criticism to web posts from Goth kids with names like vlad666. Having never been a horror fan, she didn't know anything about vampires beyond the basic Count Chocula stuff. Bats, coffins, swirling capes. None of that sounded much like Alex. Nothing she'd read mentioned vampires with pushy mothers. They weren't supposed to have mothers.

On the third night, Mikhail went out and Alex did not howl. Little as she wanted to see him up close, she became increasingly worried that something was wrong with him. So after an hour or so she mustered up the courage to go check on him.

She found him lucid and sitting up. He looked better, relatively speaking. Most of the bubbly stuff had sloughed off his face and hands, leaving him looking skinned more than anything else—like one of those anatomical models from science class. After an awkward moment of silence he started to talk, hesitantly at first, and then faster and faster. His voice was raspy and the words slightly slurred.

"I was trying to think of the right way to tell you, but I kept putting it off. I let it come between us, I let it hurt you, all because I was too cowardly to lay it out from the very start. I wanted you to learn to like me—a lot—before I told you the truth. But when I was lying in that pit not knowing if I'd live out the day, I was so sorry. Sorry for the way I'd left things with you. I knew you'd hate me, think I left you, think I broke my word."

Out of breath, he stopped to wheeze. He sat cross-legged on a sleeping bag. They'd commandeered her camping gear. Another bag was unzipped and wrapped around his shoulders. She didn't think he had anything on under there—how could he? His hands looked like raw meat. He kept them still and spread open on his knees. She thought she might see the white of his knuckle bones poking through the stringy flesh and averted her eyes.

"I have questions."

"I bet." He looked up at her, his neck craned awkwardly, waiting.

Helena averted her eyes again. She'd feel better if she had a pad in her hand, or better, a digital recorder. It would be so much easier to see him as a documentary subject than as a lover. She didn't even know where to start with the questions, so just threw out the first thing that came to her.

"Are you dead?"

A wheeze came from him that might have been a laugh. "Almost." He lifted one of his ghastly hands from his knee in a stiff, apologetic gesture. She didn't know if she was looking at a tragedy or just seeing the monster he really was beneath it all. For someone to be so burned yet so…animated. It was plain wrong.

"I'm not dead. We're not ghouls. Just a different species."

"A humanoid species no one knows about?"

"No one wants to know about us. We're your shadow."

Helena folded her arms, very skeptical. "And this marriage thing. That wasn't a lie?"

"No." He said it again, lower. "No."

"Why don't you marry a woman of your own kind?"

Alex's voice went cold and formal. She'd offended him, but she didn't much care. "My mother's first priority was identifying my soul mate, regardless of species."

"That doesn't make sense. What with the hours and the taped-up windows and the…eating. I mean, it must be awkward to keep a mixed household. I don't understand how it's done."

His distant, formal tone continued. "That's not a problem, because it usually doesn't remain a 'mixed household' for long."

It took a moment for that to sink in. When it did, her stomach twisted. "Oh jeez. Oh crap. You wouldn't."

"Only when you asked. We'd have to if we wanted children."

Helena leaned back against the cold, cement wall. "You can really do that? Oh my God." She could be like them? As much as she tried to repress it, she remembered Alex tearing into her like an animal. Felt it.

Never. She'd never do it.

"You should sit."

"I don't want to!" She pushed off the wall and began to pace the narrow, low-ceilinged room. It smelled bad down there. A combination of damp concrete and sick, unwashed vampire.

"And how old are you?"

"Twenty-seven."

She'd expected him to say two-hundred and fifty or something. The shock made her stop pacing. "But you're just a baby."

"Why, how old are you?"

"Thirty-one. Thirty-two, I mean."

"So? That's no big deal."

"That's a significant difference." She'd always dated men at least five years older than her. "Why would someone your age even want to get married?"

"I've always wanted to be married. My brothers used to laugh at me about it. Then Gregor got married and decided it wasn't so bad after all. And Mikhail, well, he just stopped laughing altogether."

Helena stopped pacing and sat on her heels about ten feet away from him. That was about as close as was comfortable. He confused her. He really did. She rubbed her face and tried to think clearly—without success.

"What is it with Mikhail anyway?"

Alex cricked his neck in her direction. "What do you mean?"

"You're brothers but you don't look much alike."

"He takes after my father. Me and Gregor look like Ma."

"No, I mean, he looks more vampire-y than you—than you used to."

"That's a long story. Mikhail is Knyaz. Our leader. Pop was, but he stepped down last year and Mikhail is first born. Being Knyaz makes him more…more like what you see, but Mikhail has always been like that in some ways. He's been preparing for this all his life."

"He's the head of your family, you mean?"

"Pop is still head of our family, but Misha has taken over what I guess you'd call the family business."

Helena looked at him expectantly. He was dancing around something, so she just waited until he spit it out.

"Mikhail oversees our people and protects our territory." He took a deep, rattling breath. "Our feeding grounds. From other vamps."

Helena puzzled that one out, and didn't like what she came up with. "Like ranchers protecting your stock?"

He didn't seem to pick up on the distaste in her voice. Instead he considered the question. "Sort of. No one feeds on our territory without our permission. All feeding has to be on the down low. It's how we go unnoticed. Mikhail enforces these rules."

"And if someone breaks your rules?"

Alex glanced up at her. "Do you really want to know all this right now?"

"No." The less she knew the better. Less fodder for nightmares. "I really wish you would have told me first. What you were. Before we slept together."

He nodded. "You should not have found out this way. I don't know how to make it better."

His eyes were still Alex's. That was the worst of it.

"It's just that I've only known you for one day, really. And I don't understand what all this means. My reality is not the same as it used to be, and I really want the old one back." Her voice wavered as she spoke, but she managed not to cry.

Alex was silent a long while, then he said, "I feel better tonight. It's time I returned your basement to you. Mikhail can't feed me forever. So I'll go back home where it's easier for me to…um, find something to eat. I can't…it's harder in a strange town."

Helena squirmed as much as him while he spoke, wondering what gory details he was skipping over when he spoke of eating. "You're leaving?"

A little whistling sound escaped him. A ghost of a snort. "You want me to stay?"

Not really, no. She couldn't say that aloud because she felt sorry for him, so she said nothing.

He bent what was left of his face into a crooked smile, showing way too many teeth. "You need time to absorb this. I need time to heal."

Despite herself, she let him see her shoulders sag in relief.

Mikhail stepped in between them, materializing out of the shadows of the basement. She stifled a squeak of surprise.

Wincing, Alex craned his neck backward to look his brother in the face. Helena glanced between them, perceiving but not understanding a hint of threat in the air. Mikhail said, very soft, "You're not going anywhere, Alexander Ivanovitch."

He turned to her, cold and courtly as usual. "We must beg your hospitality a little longer."