CHRIS

He opened his eyes to find that another night had passed. He had been in the strange room with Dezi for over two months. He knew that it was time to leave with his new vampire bride.

They had passed their time Feeding off of the defenseless mortals and lazing on the cushions together. The other vampires seemed to find their antics amusing. They watched the new vampire and the vampire girl and held silent about the secret they knew.

Dezi wasn’t quite as young and innocent as she pretended to be. She had been Made by Donal, which said a lot. She had been given the BloodTouch when she was sixteen… in 1795. She had been his lover and friend long before Chris’ ancestors had even met.

That was one thing about Donal that was never spoken about. He never gave the BloodTouch to adults, or ever hung around with them much. He liked children, and only children.

DEZI

She hugged Chris. He was so soft and kind, not at all like Donal had been.

Donal had torn through her without a thought, angry and demanding, his own pleasure foremost in his thoughts. Chris was considerate and always asked permission before he did something. She liked the feeling it gave her of having some control over what was happening. He definitely was not like Donal and she was thankful and loved him all the more for it.

She wiped her lips and smiled at him over the body of a young woman who was lost in a haze of mind numbing pleasure.

"Tastes good, doesn’t it?" she asked. He nodded agreement, wiping his face with the edge of his shirt, staining the cloth. "It’s the fact that they give themselves freely. Wild mortals have more of a tangy taste to their blood, but sometimes domesticated mortals are better."

He grinned and licked his lips wordlessly. Looking at him, she got an idea. She smiled and stood up.

"Come on, let’s go visit the city. I have some money. We can buy new clothes and anything else we want. After we shop, we can go to The Vampire Club and get a couple of Bloody Marys. It’ll be fun. Trust me."

"How will we get there?" he asked hesitantly.

"We’ll walk, silly, everybody in the city walks. Come on, it’ll be an adventure." She held her hand out to him. "And I know! We’ll invite Lianndra; I bet he’ll be happy to come along. Besides, he always has money to spend."

LIANNDRA

The life of a regular child was something he had never experienced, not even when he had been one. When he had been a real child, Lianndra had spent all of his time among adults, being petted and adored as a beautiful little boy. In a way, he had never had a friend that was his own age, and now it was a little farfetched that he would suddenly find one.

Yet now, at two hundred and twenty-one years old, he was experiencing the things that modern children did everyday and he was enjoying himself immensely. He thought it was a little strange that he would enjoy himself so much, yet here he was.

Instead of going to The Vampire Club, they went to a regular restaurant. They wanted to give Chris more time to adapt. It wouldn’t do to have him embarrass himself in front of the older vampires. Things like that could mark a person socially for hundreds of years.

Lianndra found a regular mortal restaurant a pleasant change from normal. He had spent a lot of the night in the throes of laughter, and not the usual dark laughter either. He had been happy, which was something new.

He especially laughed when Dezi tried to eat soup and found that it wouldn’t go down her throat and that she couldn’t suck it up her fangs. All it did was dribble down her chin in a trail of vegetable broth.

"Didn’t you bother to read the book on vampire eating I gave you?" Lianndra asked. "It’s simple if you know how to do it.

"Open your mouth," he ordered. "Good, now slip a spoonful in and carefully tighten the muscles of your throat one by one. Allow the tightening to follow a course down, down into your stomach where God only knows what happens to it. Don’t eat too much, we don’t know where it goes, and personally I wouldn’t want to find out."

He frowned as Chris tried it, only to gag it back up again. "Chris, I think you should wait a couple of years until you have fully Become. We wouldn’t want you to vomit it all back up again. That would not be proper manners to put all of these nice people through. Now would it?"

He held a napkin out and shook his head. These young vampires were not as smart as they all seemed to think they were.

A smile quirked his lips.

They had just about finished their evening of fun when Lianndra began to get a strange, fluttery, flickery feeling in his stomach. He groaned. Time seemed to slow around him as his stomach roiled.

The restaurant walls seemed to be melting into a puddle on the floor. They stretched and pulled like warm taffy. The people too looked like they were melting. Their skin stretched taut over pointed bones. They were ugly monstrosities. They were creatures that should have been found under a rock never meant to be turned over. Their skin puddled on the floor, leaving their white bones to crumble and shatter into millions of fragments.

He felt horror and disgust fill him. What was happening? Why were they all so ugly and disfigured? What was happening to him?

He could feel his skin stretching too. Did he look like these others? Was that what they were seeing when they looked at him, the incredible stretching, melting boy?

Lianndra covered his eyes. He would not, could not see such ugliness, not if he wanted to keep his sanity.

A cloud of dense and implacable evil hung over his head. He heard a laugh that mocked innocence. It filled his mind with horrifying images of decapitated bodies, mutilations, splatters of gore, crushed-olive eyeballs, buckets of half-rotted entrails floating in sewage black blood…

He let out a groan that was a mixture of horror and ecstasy.

These foul images both repelled and drew him. They made him want to run outside and fling himself on the helpless pedestrians. They made him want to do gruesome things to little children, men and women, and even animals.

The feelings that accompanied the images were made to feed the hungry monster that lives in every creature. They made that monster hunger for more. He wanted to hurt. He wanted to rape and kill. He wanted… to Feed.

When such thoughts batter a mind that is against those kinds of things, the brain’s last defense comes to the rescue. Even though Lianndra wasn’t the most feeling and conscience driven of people, he was not a sadist. These thoughts were not natural to his mind, and as such his mind repelled them.

Lianndra passed into a land of darkness and peace, his body slumping in his chair.

DEZI

Lianndra shockingly began to slip low in his seat. His smooth white face was suddenly suffused with a bright purplish-red color that was very troubling considering it meant the burning of hundreds of millions of blood cells in his cheeks.

She stood and went to his side quickly. What she was supposed to do for him, she had no idea. It wasn’t like she could restart his heart or anything. There wasn’t a CPR for vampires, that was for sure.

Dezi touched his forehead and gasped. Instead of the cool skin she had expected, she found that he was burning hot. Her palm began to blister from the heat radiating from him.

Without a real thought, she reached onto the table and poured a full glass of ice water over Lianndra’s head. The water began to bubble and boil as it flowed over his head and face. His hair dried instantly, so dry in fact, that it looked like pale, flaxen straw. That horrible color lessened, but he was still not the correct vampirish color. His skin was suffused with blotches, what a doctor would have attested to broken capillaries. He looked terrible.

"What’s happening?" Chris asked from the sidelines.

She looked up at him briefly. His eyes were wide as he stared at Lianndra. "I don’t know, I really don’t know."

She heard the mutters and gasps around her as the other people in the restaurant began to get worried about the little boy.

A loud voice called out, "If he’s choking, do the Heimlich!"

Dezi looked up with a scowl. "He’s not choking, you idiot. There is something very wrong with him and it’s not the food."

"Yeah," Chris added sneeringly. "He probably looked at your face, fatty."

The angry man lunged towards Chris with murder reflected in his eyes. Chris drew back his lip, letting only the man see the razor-sharp tips of his fangs, no one else.

The man was suitably quieted. He shakily returned to his seat, his face pale, his hands trembling slightly.

"What are we going to do? What if he dies?" Chris asked her in a small little voice filled with worry. He was a young vampire after all and unsure of proper protocol. He hadn’t learned that vampire blushes weren’t just blushes--they could mean that a vampire was sick or just burning off excess blood.

Dezi looked him straight in the eye, knowing that she would have to nip his wild fear in the bud or there would be trouble in the future. With a firm voice, she said, "We are going to call the Brethren together. They will come. They all owe one or more favors to Lianndra."

Her face seemed to close and she went still. Since, as a vampire, she didn’t really need to breathe, there was something statue-like about her absolute stillness, something faintly troubling. Something that felt "wrong," blank and dead, an emptiness that nothing everyday-human could ever touch.

A hum began to fill the air around her.

All those watching would swear about what they saw. They all saw things wrong, except for Chris who watched with unclouded judgement and the open-minded vision of someone beyond the normal realm.

Voices came out of the air. They were speaking softly, their perfect tones rising in cadence as they asked the same question, "Why are we called?" Thousands of voices, millions of voices, in different languages and different tones, yet somehow all the same.

Dezi spoke, "To all those that live in the city: you are called in the name of Lianndra. You all know him and owe him the lives that you live. Come, he is ill in such a way that I know not."

The hum grew louder then disappeared.

Dezi relaxed her stiff posture. "They come," she said simply.

Chris nodded wordlessly, his face solemn and his eyes wiser than his years. Someday, if he survived long enough, his mind would match the wisdom that filled his eyes.

Five minutes later the room was filled with both ancient and new vampires. They sat at the tables and ordered weird things from the nervous waiters.

There were only two waiters working that night, and they were beginning to feel sorry for themselves even though the weird customers tipped generously. It was rather strange that they were all so pale and beautiful, most of them having whitish-blond hair, as if they were all related to each other in some way. A relationship that was somehow stronger than blood.

Out of the fifty strange customers, only one ordered a hamburger and fries. Unfortunately, he ordered it blended. He sucked the mixture up through a straw while his waiter watched, horrified. The poor young man was thin and fragile looking. He was beginning to think that deciding to work his way through college had been a bad idea. He planned to quit in the morning and take up a safer job somewhere far from here.

"Okay everybody, here’s what we have to do," Dezi said, raising her voice. Some of the older ones looked at her as if she was a bug, but at least they were paying attention. "We have to spin a web of protection so that whatever attacked Lianndra can’t get back at him while he’s weak. I’ll begin."

She wasn’t much for magic--she had her little prejudices--but she knew some of the basic tricks that anyone picks up after a long life spent in the undersides of the world.

Dezi closed her eyes and reached deep, calling up the Three Powers that formed All. It felt sort of like grabbing onto a lightning bolt. The power was terrible and frightening, yet exhilarating at the same time.

She focused the power and sent it spinning out of her as a thread that could only be seen with the inner eye. It was so thin and golden that it almost hurt to see.

A woman in a sheath dress stepped forward and raised her hands, gathering the threads to her, then spinning them out farther, stronger. Others stepped forward and copied her, sending the threads out, spinning themselves into the threads.

In moments the air was filled with flying threads, crossing and recrossing over each other, forming an impenetrable wall of protection. The vampires stood in a circle around the still form of Lianndra who had been placed in the middle of the room, the tables pushed out of the way. Mortals stood off to the side, guarded from escaping by a hugely muscular man with the kind of face that was like a promise of vile humors. They were suitably cowed by his silent threat.

Dezi kept her attentions on the protections, her only thought to keep Lianndra safe until he was back up to full strength. She didn’t know how she knew, but she thought that the attacker had been lucky to catch him unawares. They wouldn’t get a second chance, not with her on guard.

CHRIS

"What are you going to do?" Chris asked, curious. He didn’t know what Dezi and the others were doing exactly, but he still managed to feel totally useless.

"I don’t know. What’s wrong with him?" Frederich said.

Frederich was the local vampire doctor. Before he had received the BloodTouch, he had had his own small but lucrative practice. Even though he wasn’t well known, he had a reputation. Some said that he could bring the dead back to life with a look. They weren’t far wrong.

Frederich frowned. He put his hands in his pockets and thoughtfully began to go through the contents in them. What to do. What to do.

He seemed to get an idea. He got down on his knees in front of Lianndra and began to mutter. Strange words that sounded a little like "Quarter-pounder with fries. Boy, you’re really going to owe me if you live." Somehow, Chris was not reassured.

In another ten minutes, Frederich had done something that had brought Lianndra bolt upright and awake. It was a real miracle.

The first thing the vampire boy said was, "Tispith has really gone too far." Then, "Hey, what’s going on?"

"You gave us all a real surprise," Frederich said. "We thought that maybe you were beyond resurrection." He stood up and dusted the knees of his pants and his hands free of imagined dirt and dust. "Now, if you’re all right, I’ll be off. I was in a Jacuzzi with a twenty-year old mortal. You should see the huge… on her." He made a gesture like the one from the vulgar joke about Dolly Pardon.

Chris snorted in disgust. The older vampires were really starting to get on his nerves. He had only met a couple of them, but they all seemed to be arrogant assholes. He thought that if Dezi hadn’t forced them to come, they wouldn’t even have cared if Lianndra had died.

"You should be ashamed," he said, not thinking. "Look at the poor mortals, they’re frightened out of their wits and all you can think about is some woman’s breasts."

Frederich gave him a strange look, as if he were a dog that had stood up and started to talk. The man shook his head and started towards the door, pushing the vampires in front of him out of his way, startling them out of whatever fugue had held them. They blinked around dazedly and that hair-raising power faded as if it had never been

Lianndra was muttering in some strange language. After his first few words in English, he had started to speak in a language filled with liquid accents and strange enunciations. It was a little troubling.

Chris looked at Dezi for guidance. All she could do was shrug tiredly. What could she do after all? It wasn’t as if she could read minds. If she could, she would have reached right into Lianndra’s brain and fixed whatever had been done to him.

As it was, she wanted a hot soak in a tub and someone to bite. Spells of protection were tiring, especially when someone kept trying to sneak their way through.

CHELSEA

She screamed in her mind. How could she have done something so incredibly stupid?

She hadn’t been thinking, just acting. Without a thought, she had stepped into an alley and was bashed over the head with some hard object. During the lull after she had killed her attacker and was licking the blood off her lips and fingers, Tispith had attacked.

Before she could do anything, she found herself trapped in her mind again. When Tispith had attacked Lianndra so brutally in the restaurant, Chelsea had been forced to watch helplessly. There was nothing she could do.

She had been sickened by the hatred and savagery of her earlier self. Had she always been like that? Yet in a way, she knew that she was a separate person sharing a body with a madwoman. A woman that could Feed without rest for years. A woman that could laugh as she ripped another vampire in half, mentally and physically. It was rather sickening.

Chelsea screamed once more, then silenced herself with only her conscious will. Screaming wasn’t helping anything. She could scream for years with nobody to hear her. She had to do something that would actually save her, but what?

Tispith was angry. How could she have figured in the fact that Frederich would save Lianndra? It had been impossible to foresee, but she should have seen something like it. Instead she had gloated with premature victory, thinking that Lianndra would be lost forever.

How could she have done something so stupid, giving herself away like that, opening herself up to attack? It was something she would never have done before. She was weaker than she had ever been. It was hard for her to even think, what with that little idiot screaming in her brain without rest.

She frowned hard. There had to be a better, easier way to get rid of Lianndra, but how? And if she was really going to start a war, she was going to have to call up a few of her chosen warriors.

With a sudden change of mood, her lips twitched slightly in a cruel smile. Ah, the blood she would spill and the lives she would ruin. It was absolutely delicious.

CHRIS

He was feeling a lot of strange things. As he levitated alongside Lianndra and Dezi, he couldn’t help noticing some things about himself. Like he had never noticed before that his own scent was a strange mix of cinnamon and that smell that all boys seemed to have. It was a combination of sweat and bubble gum, even though he hadn’t had gum of any kind in so long he could barely remember.

On his own, he never would have been able to levitate the whole way to Lianndra’s apartment, he just didn’t have the power to do it, not yet. The other two each gripped one of his arms above the elbow and helped him, their hands tight and strong. All in all, the whole levitating experience was kinda fun.

On TV, whenever they showed someone levitating, they showed them either horizontal or vertical. The three vampires levitated without thought, their clothes rippling with the unfelt breeze that passed through the cloth, their legs crossed as if they were sitting comfortably on some invisible floor. The illusion was so strong that Chris could almost feel the pressure beneath him.

Dezi looked over at him with a smile. "Do you like your first flight?" Her free hand was pressed against his side, her hands doing things as if the cloth wasn’t there at all.

Something that would have probably shocked most mortals was one part of the thing vampires called sex. Sex for a vampire was not a physical act, or at least, it didn’t have to be, not all of it. The most enjoyable part wasn’t really physical love, not if they didn’t want it to be and if they knew the secrets of touch.

Chris had learned from Dezi a wonderful thing she called "Tapping", something the like of which he had never felt before. It was sort of like mind-meshing through physical contact.

With her palm flat against his side, Dezi could do any number of things to his mind, one of which was make vampire love.

Another version of vampire sex was "love bites". Blood was sacred, or at least that’s what all of the old teachings said. Mortal blood was delicious, but vampire blood was pure ecstasy, especially when it was given freely.

Most vampire relationships didn’t last for very long, but for as long as they did, they were worth it, in enjoyment anyway. Imagine a relationship of equals, mixed with human sex, Tapping and love bites. Blood and sex, nature’s most potent of combinations.

Chris let out a groan, feeling the soft touch of Dezi as she gently probed his pleasure centers with her mind. He could hear her laughter as she traced the thing that was him; the thing that made up his identity, his personality, she was probing his very soul with delicious little sweeps of her mind.

Suddenly he felt another hand on his other side. This hand was smaller, cooler, more delicate and well made.

"May I join you?" the cultured voice that he knew to be Lianndra asked.

Another touch, one that was softer, smoother, longer, more defined. Lianndra was experienced at what he was doing. He could get the ultimate results and enjoy the backwash from the pleasure that he gave Chris. And through Chris, he pleasured Dezi, who moaned and pleasured Chris, who pleasure Lianndra. And on it went until they reached the apartment and had to stop to land on the rooftop.

If he had still been a full human, Chris would have been soaked in sweat. He would also have probably been in traction. As it was, he felt a little limp and emotionally wrung out.

With help he managed to make it down the stairs from the roof and back to Lianndra’s apartment.

He could feel daylight approaching. They only had about half an hour before dawn. They should have already been preparing themselves for a day of nothingness and immobility.

Chris figured that he and Dezi would go back to that backroom with all of the other vampire couples.

Lianndra changed that when he said, "Here, how about you both stay here? There’s no reason for you to go all the way back to the Relax Chambers. My bed is big enough for all of us to Sleep in during the sunlight hours. It isn’t as if you’re going to kick me out of bed." He gave a soft velvety laugh at the thought.

They all knew that during the daylight hours they were unaware, that they didn’t move, they didn’t breath, they didn’t do anything. All they did was lie there, their bodies still with no movement at all, not even a heartbeat.

Dezi looked at Chris, who thought a moment and nodded, it wasn’t like a threesome or anything. They were vampires. They didn’t really do sex, they just enjoyed themselves. No matter what it would seem like to mortals. But that was the whole point, they weren’t mortal. They were above mortal points of view. They were eternal. They were forever young and forever understanding. They were what they were. They were vampires.

Vampire love was a thing of many forms, always changing and growing, something other than normal. There were no children of the body unless spells were cast and a price was paid, no disease, nothing but the simple joy of the moment.

They were all dark creatures, finding respite from the wiles of immortality wherever they could get it. In the forms and minds of others, in the dark games that some of them played, in the forming of human thought, in the changing tides of the universe and in the secret joy of knowing that time could not touch them. They were alone in the world, together. Forever was spread out before them, fraught with countless possibilities and countless pains.

He yawned and stretched, stripping to his boxers before climbing under the sheets and blankets, the clothes forgotten on the floor. He was lost in his need to Sleep, his body going numb around him.

Dezi and Lianndra followed, squeezing him in the middle. The bed was definitely large. There was room for at least another five people, that was how big it was.

They all stretched at the same moment, their hands meeting and gripping together, then falling unnoticed on the comforter as they fell into the darkness that came during the day.

Their faces stiffened emotionless, their bodies went rigid and doll-like, completely empty of life. They lay there, immobile and unmovable for a minute or two, then their bodies released all tension and fell into a semblance of normal sleep. Breathless and unshifting normal sleep, boneless and still.

Lying there, they were each beautiful and perfect featured. A painter seeing them would have raced for his or her easel and paintbrush in a hurry to paint the image that they represented--death on a holiday.