Unnamed Vampire Story 3

He sprints through the persistent drizzle, feeling the light, cold sting on his cheeks. He thinks about his mother. Her hands were soft. She sang abolitionist songs in the warm radius of an oil lamp while putting bloody stitches into living flesh. As a child, he had seen her at work once. He vomited violently onto the dirt floor of the medical tent. "How do you do it?" he asked. She had crouched beside him and folded his trembling body into a gray jacket that smelled like his father.

His mother was a woman of few words and simple wisdoms. "You try real hard, my dearest." They sat together, curled on the floor; he could barely see the injured soldier's toes over the edge of their kitchen table, which had transformed overnight into a surgeon's bench. Above their heads, the soldier moaned. "And then," she murmured, obviously eager to resume her sewing, "you keep your head above you, and your feet beneath you. That's all."

These days, he wears designer sneakers, but he's always mindful of where his human feet would have faltered. With the grace of a parkour master, he launches himself at a fire escape, hand over hand climbing the rungs; he can't feel the cold, but he knows the paint is flaking off and the metal is slippery. Head up, feet down. A pleasant electricity runs through his fingers; the sensation keeps him alert. He focuses. Head, feet.

Two hundred yards away, he hears a woman inhale sharply. It gives him enough time to dodge. For a moment, he remembers what his flesh was like: skin, sinew, muscle. A large-caliber bullet rips through his calf, and he lurches forward and up. She leads him expertly, and the second shot pierces his upper back.

After the first night, his mother never asked him to assist, but she did invite him to watch. He could see her biceps flex as she bent her full weight onto the bone saw. She spoke in relaxing tones, but that wasn't enough. Until the end of the war, their house was stocked with plenty of cheap whiskey for future amputees. Over the sounds of her patients and the grind of metal on bone, she told him, "You could take away his arms or his legs or his pride or his country, but he's still a man so long as he drinks hard liquor."

Cool blood pours out of the exit wound in his chest, but now he knows exactly where she is: a warehouse window, four blocks east, six floors up. Taking a liquidy breath--she punctured a lung, apparently--he lines his legs behind him and pushes off like a swimmer doing laps. He doesn't have the mechanism nor the magic to fly properly, but gliding is a different story. His arms fan wide, and for a moment, it's like free fall.

Head up, feet down. He lands on top of her, chest on her chest, but she doesn't scream. She's already got her combat knife drawn, the sharp edge flush against his throat. "You're getting old, Steward. Maybe a century and change is your limit."

He grins when he hears her gasp. The blade digs into his skin, then his throat. He presses his lips to her neck, feeling the hot rush in her jugular. Even soaked in the same stinging rain, her heat makes him drunk. He is surprised and pleased to find fear radiating from her, and it gives him goosebumps. He bares his teeth against her skin. Up, down. Reorient. Draw back.

They sit side by side on the cement floor. She dismantles and polishes her weapon, replacing each piece in its molded foam groove. "I guess I deserved that," she says, her face molded back into the impenetrable mask he was used to working with. "I used real bullets. FMJs. The blanks fly wrong with the wind. Sorry, bud." She shows him a sheepish face, but he knows she doesn't mean it. Nevertheless, their working relationship is based on a mutual deception and tolerance; he lets her apologize as best she can. "My bad."

He nods, but the gesture hurts. He opts instead to wait for his body to repair, holding the halves of his throat together with cold fingers. He is extra conscious of his parts, muscle binding, skin cells reknitting into the pattern they remember. When he finds his voice again, he says, "Don't forget, Anabelle. They're not like you. They don't have to stop."

"Lesson learned, steward." When he was on top of her, she had grown pale. The color returns to her cheeks again, a perceptible glow that he can feel on his skin. "Next time, I won't need a second shot."